by Pamela Fryer
Chapter One
Northern Oregon, November
The steady drizzle soaked through her jeans and pressed a chill against her skin. Brooke Weaver clenched her jaw to stop her teeth from chattering. She pushed through the crowd of FBI agents and local officials, carefully watching the first of the young women emerging from the compound’s gates. They were in handcuffs and chained together at the ankles in pairs of two.
Though not one of them appeared older than twenty, they were trained in guerilla tactics, capable of whatever acts necessary—from prostitution to murder—to serve the cult. Preservation Earth Spirit was one of the most violent cults in history, making the Branch Davidians look like a cheerleader camp. Brooke didn’t want to know what any of these women had done for their cause. She didn’t care. She had one goal: find Sara Brown.
The girl with the plain name was anything but. Sara was the rebellious daughter of Senator Tomas Brown, one of the richest and most influential men in New York, and it was Brooke’s job to bring her home.
Though she held a license as a private investigator, Brooke prided herself on being different than most PIs. She specialized in finding lost family members; most commonly she was hired to find underage runaways and spousal kidnappings, but she also went after drug addicts of all ages. In other words, the generally troubled. And after everything Sara Brown had been through, she definitely qualified.
A mouthy reporter in Tucson had dubbed Brooke “The Lost Finder” in a snarkily written article, and the moniker stuck. Later she’d learned the reporter was the girlfriend of the lead detective who’d resented Brooke for breaking one of his cold cases, but as nicknames went, it wasn’t so bad. She’d been called worse.
Brooke positioned herself at the edge of the crowd to get a good look at each woman as they shuffled toward the FBI buses. The gloomy gray sky served as a bleak reminder that even if she found Sara here, the troubles this case presented were far from over. Preservation Earth Spirit used brutal brain-washing techniques on its recruits. Sara would be resistant, and possibly dangerous.
“Sara Brown. Do you know Sara?”
The women stared at her as they shambled past, some of them with resentment in their returned glares, some of them wearing a vacuous emptiness. Some with the kind of dark, haunted fear in their eyes that made Brooke shiver.
But it wasn’t only the horror of these poor souls that made dread sit in Brooke’s stomach like sour milk. Everything about this job, about having to come back to her hometown of Ridgemont, Oregon and face the one client she’d failed, made Brooke think this case was going to end in disaster. Never mind this was where her murderous ex-fiancé lived as well.
“I’m looking for Sara Brown. She’s been here since August.”
None of the women replied, but that didn’t stop Brooke from holding up the photo and asking each one.
“Please, look at the picture. She’s seventeen years old.”
“Miss.” One of the FBI agents warned her back with a raised hand.
Brooke eased another foot away. Before they boarded the buses, agents screened each woman with metal detectors, and two agents flanked the doors with trained Beagles sniffing for explosive devices. The agents were wearing Kevlar, helmets, and plexi-visors. Two feet wasn’t going to save Brooke, wearing only jeans and a leather jacket, if one of these girls had a grenade tucked in her pocket.
She glanced over the women. The end of the line was nearly to the gates. She hadn’t seen Sara, but there had been so many of them she might have missed her.
Brooke approached an agent standing by herself in front of the first bus. Her snappy suit and rigid posture said “I’m important.” She wore an oversized nylon jacket and baseball cap marked “FBI” to ward off the icy drizzle. The badge hanging around her neck identified her as Lead Special Agent Dail.
“Excuse me—”
A burst of sound through the woman’s radio interrupted Brooke.
“That’s the last of them,” an unseen voice crackled through the device.
“Roger that. Do a final sweep and then lock down the building.” The agent gave Brooke a make-it-quick-I’m-incredibly-busy look.
“My name is Brooke Weaver. I’m a private investigator. I’ve been hired by Senator Tomas Brown to find his daughter.”
She showed credentials: a license issued by the state of New York that was all but irrelevant in Oregon. With her stringy wet hair and rumpled clothes, she looked no better than the drably uniformed cultists coming out of the compound.
But on this case her client had clout, and that meant Brooke had clout.
“May I please look through the women on the buses?”
The agent’s gaze skipped over to the gun license before rising to meet hers. She had the courtesy not to glance over Brooke like she was a street urchin.
“Are you carrying a weapon today, Miss Weaver?”
“No, ma’am.”
Agent Dail’s severe expression softened. “What makes you think she’s here?”
“I’ve tracked her to Preservation Earth Spirit by cell phone calls and bank transactions,” she answered simply. Before Senator Brown had cut off Sara’s credit cards, she’d trickled deposits surpassing thirty thousand dollars to the private account of James Carey, the cult’s leader.
Brooke had a strong suspicion that money helped fund the fatal bombing at the University of Portland three weeks ago in which nine students and two professors were killed—a bombing for which Preservation Earth Spirit took credit.
But what this obvious go-by-the-rules agent didn’t know, she didn’t need to. Sara was already wanted for stabbing the lecherous motorist who’d picked her up hitchhiking in Nevada, and that would throw a wrench in the quick departure Brooke had planned. She kept the details to herself, hoping she could find Sara and get the hell out of Dodge before the FBI caught wind of it.
The starched agent looked over Brooke’s shoulder and called to a young Latino woman in full riot gear. “Escort Miss Weaver onto the women’s buses.” She held up two fingers as her piercing gaze returned to Brooke. “Two minutes.”
Brooke liked her immediately. If Special Agent Dail had a low opinion of private investigators, as most uniforms did, she didn’t let it show. “Thank you.”
With a nod, Agent Dail turned her attention to the line of men leaving the compound. They routinely separated the men from the women. Females were more likely to crack under interrogation if they hadn’t seen their ringleaders in a while. Grimly, Brooke realized she knew more about cults and deprogramming than she ever wanted to. If Sara was under the influence of PES, fully absorbed as some called it, it might be weeks before she was ready to see her father again.
Sara Brown was not on the first bus. Brooke made a point of showing the picture briefly but clearly to each woman. No one spoke to her until she reached the end of the second bus.
“Sara Brown. Her father is dying of cancer and has only days to say goodbye.”
“Her father is a narcissistic tyrant,” a teenaged girl snapped. “And you’re lying.” She clearly wasn’t fully absorbed, lacking the strict discipline to hold her tongue. Reveal nothing was the code within most cults.
“And James Carey isn’t?” Brooke asked about the cult’s leader. “How many times did you open your legs for the benefit of the cult?”
The girl’s expression showed the insult hit its mark. Deprogrammers used similar techniques to let the subject’s own guilt aid in their recovery, and this girl was young enough to regret sex for profit, if she’d indeed done it. Her eyes said she had.
A glimpse of powder blue in the forest behind the compound caught Brooke’s attention. Two female figures, and then a third, sneaked into the trees.
Brooke turned around. The agent b
ehind her hadn’t noticed. “She isn’t here.”
The agent nodded and indicated Brooke should go first.
Her heart raced and Brooke no longer felt the cold. It was all she could do to keep from running from the compound.
I’ll bet half my fee Sara is one of those girls.
* * * * *
By the time Brooke maneuvered around the tangle of official vehicles, drove down the compound’s long gravel driveway, and turned onto the narrow highway, the drizzle had turned into fat, heavy drops falling from a smoke black sky. It was almost five o’clock. If it hadn’t been already blocked by the clouds, the sun would set in half an hour. A flash of light filled the sky, followed by a rumble of thunder.
Brooke glanced at the digital display on her rental car’s dash. It was fifty-two degrees outside, and dropping fast. The women would be looking for shelter. Brooke prayed they wouldn’t come upon a residence before she found them. They would use whatever wiles they could to gain entry, including violence.
She turned off the highway at the first right she came to, a rutted pavement road that stopped immediately at chained gates in front of a falling-down guard shack. A fading plywood banner covered the old sign. “Visit J&M Machining at our new facility in Portland.”
Considering the deserted J&M plant was the cult’s neighbor, Brooke felt safe to assume it would be the first place the women would go. It was probably the cult’s emergency rendezvous site.
She needed to be on her guard. There could be more than just three women hiding out here.
This unwelcome visit to her past had her nerves on edge. She cursed James Carey. Of all the two-bit backwoods towns you could have picked, you had to choose Ridgemont, you shit.
She shook it off, mentally scolding herself for letting her personal feelings interfere with a job. I will bring her home alive, Brooke vowed. I will never bring home a child in a body bag again.
A heavy chain circled the cyclone-fence gates, but the lock securing it was flimsy. She retrieved bolt cutters from the trunk and snipped through.
Brooke shoved the gates open, drove through, and stopped her car again to close the gates behind her.
No need to let anyone else know I’m here.
She eased the chain back through to make it look undisturbed, but draped the lengths loosely so she could drive straight through if she needed to get out quickly.
A bolt of lightning split the air. Brooke staggered sideways and fell to her knees. White-hot light turned the entire area as bright as high noon for the space of a heartbeat.
At once, the hairs all over her body prickled with a charge of static electricity. The air compressed, pressing on her eardrums. The boom rolled over her, deafening and ominous.
The bolt had struck a tree somewhere between her car and the plant. A fireball erupted, turning the forest eerily orange before it rolled above the treetops and unfurled in a riotous plume of smoke.
Brooke hurried to her car and jumped in. That had been too close for comfort, especially considering she’d been holding onto a metal fence when it hit.
She didn’t turn the headlights on. If anyone was in the old plant, the strike had called their attention to her location.
She glanced in her rearview mirror. Fire was a bad thing. Fire trucks would come soon if the rain didn’t extinguish the flames. Brooke didn’t need company.
She focused on the road ahead. Two orange sparks raced through the trees. Sideways.
Brooke sucked in a sharp breath. That wasn’t possible. She was seeing things, that was all. Two days without sleep will do that to you.
Brooke swerved back onto the pavement, nearly having driven off the road. Her tires bit loudly into the gravelly pavement. Anyone at the plant would have heard it. Sounds from Ridgemont’s valleys traveled for miles up its sloping mountains. She should leave the car and continue on foot.
She rounded a sharply rising curve and discovered she had no choice. The lightning had knocked over an enormous pine.
“Shit.”
She turned the car around in preparation for a quick departure and killed the engine. Brooke fished her security case of goodies from beneath the passenger seat, some of it legal, some of it not. For this trip, she chose pepper spray, a prototype Taser she was pretty sure fell into the not legal category, handcuffs, and “Betty,” her Colt .45. Brooke hoped she wouldn’t have to use any of them.
With any luck, Sara Brown was so shaken from the raid she would be easily convinced to come along.
Brooke shrugged into her damp leather jacket and slipped out of the car into the chilly Oregon evening.
The downed tree was gigantic, probably hundreds of years old. It was a sad sight, lying on its side. She hated to see anything that majestic die. She walked toward the narrow end where it jutted over the edge and discovered it would be easier to crawl underneath through the gully beside the road than try to climb over.
Once on the other side, she discovered three smaller trees had come down with it. They lay on their sides like broken matchsticks. She climbed over one and stepped through the branches of the next two. It was odd to see them knocked over like broken twigs, but what she saw in the forest was even stranger.
A burnt path as wide as a Mack truck had been cleared through the forest. Wisps of smoke rose spookily from the blackened ground. On either side of the path, the trees bore charring that rose about as high as her shoulders and then ceased in a perfectly straight line.
Weird. Crop-circle weird.
Had a plane gone down? It would explain the shooting flames and the impact on the air that had hurt her ears. But if a plane had crashed, the sound would surely have been different from the deep boom she’d heard. There would be wreckage and fires, and God forbid, bodies. She would smell the kerosene-heavy scent of spilled fuel.
But at the end of the three-hundred-foot charred strip, nothing but darkness greeted her. The only sound in the eerily still forest was the symphony of pattering raindrops.
The sights and sounds didn’t equal a rational explanation. Unease crawled slowly across her spine.
But this was a secondary problem. Brooke had a job to do, and a visit to the Twilight Zone wasn’t going to stop her from her goal.
She started up the road at a jog. Sara Brown was her singular priority. Memories of the dead girl she’d brought home on her first case still haunted her, a living nightmare permanently fixed at the edge of her mind’s eye.
I swear to God himself, that will never happen again.
Nothing, and no one, would stop her from finding Sara.
The J&M Machining plant had been beautiful, groundbreaking new architecture in the late fifties. Today it emerged through the trees a broken and forgotten tomb. A flagpole stood in the center of a grassy circle overrun with weeds. The circular driveway opened to two gigantic parking lots on either side, now cracked and weedy as well. At one corner of the lot on the right was a giant, unkempt pile of scrap metal. It had been picked through until every last iota of value had been scavenged, and judging by the rusted-out frame of an old car near the pile, it had since turned from a scavenge pit to a dumping ground.
The lobby once had an enormous glass front, but now the gaping entrance was covered with falling plywood.
Brooke crept inside with careful steps, listening for voices. The interior was a skeleton. Even the second floor had been removed. All that remained were the steel girders holding up the walls of what had once been the corporate offices.
Another gaping hole led to an overgrown courtyard with a cement fountain the size of a kiddie pool in its center. Foul water obscured the bottom. Standing beyond the courtyard, the manufacturing building was a locked fortress.
Mold and mildew wafted on the damp air, but above that was a briny, rotten scent she couldn’t identify.
Something about this didn’t feel right.
She’d been operating on police training, but now instinct kicked in.
Brooke drew her .45 with her right hand and held the
small LED flashlight from her keychain in her left. Debris crunched under her feet. She went through the far opening to gloriously clean air and inhaled a deep lungful.
At that moment, the setting sun slid into a crack of sky visible between the clouds. The orange glow emerged like a ray of hope and warmed her chilled bones.
The doors to the manufacturing plant were chained shut, but Brooke found a window covered by plywood that had been pried away. In the mud beneath was a fresh footprint from a woman’s Ked sneaker. All the women had been wearing the same cheap shoes.
Brooke gave a silent cheer of triumph. She’d gambled right. But the minute she slipped through the window, that stench was back even stronger than before, along with the clammy feeling that something about this situation was dreadfully wrong. Her unease kicked up to full-fledged red alert.
The manufacturing plant had fared better than the administrative building. The walls were solid here, and she found herself in what had probably been a supervisor’s office. At the end of a long hall, she came to a lobby area with an exposed cement stairway and an open doorway to the manufacturing floor.
In the center of the wide area was a single muddy smudge. Whoever left it had come through here, but where they went next she couldn’t be sure.
Were the women upstairs, or in the plant?
A swishing sound and the clamor of a heavy metal object falling over in the manufacturing area answered her question.
Still not ready to announce herself, she slipped quickly through the doorway so the wan light in the lobby didn’t silhouette her. A waft of noxious odor hit her as she hunkered low against the wall.
If some animal had crawled in here and died, it had been a big one.
Her eyes adjusted slowly. She made out abandoned tooling cribs and platforms. The area was a gigantic, rusting cemetery. All she knew about J&M Machining was that they tooled machine parts for mechanical equipment. Her uncle had worked in the small appliances division for twenty-two years before becoming one of J&M’s laid-off casualties.
A scream bounced off the walls, sending Brooke’s hair prickling for the second time today. She pushed off the wall and ran forward, forgoing stealth. She couldn’t let anything happen to Sara.
