The Apostle (Carson Ryder, Book 12)

by J. A. Kerley

  “I’m thinking I’ll consult an expert in the field,” I said.

  “An expert in religion?”

  “In madness.”

  I jogged to my office. During my brother’s institutionalized decade he’d known several homicidal religious maniacs, including Preaching Bill Barton. Barton was an ordained minister in a small Ohio church who’d had visions of children in his congregation possessed by demons (“I saw them tiny little eyes light up with hellfire”) and had stealthily abducted and murdered three of them. Police were stymied by the disappearances until one Sunday morning when Barton’s sermon included pulling the eyes of the children from his pocket to demonstrate how they glowed in the dark.

  Jeremy didn’t answer the landline so I tried his cell phone. He answered and in the background I heard a jumble of voices talking, yelling, singing.

  “You’re out in the street, right?” I said. “In front of Schrum’s house?”

  “It’s party time here, Carson. Schrum’s press office just released a statement suggesting the great man might be on the mend. The statement was a mix of medicine and mumbo-jumbo, but it’s got the crowd in an ecstatic frenzy. A rumor’s circulating that Schrum appeared at his balcony door last night, as if ready to step out, but turned away at the last moment. The throng is taking it as a sign that he’s up and about, which, as I’ve mentioned, has been since his arrival.”

  “Maybe it’s a sign I’m supposed to call you. I need a bit of insight on a case.”

  “Bit as in minuscule portion?” he said, amused. “You never need a bit of anything, Carson.”

  “I simply need observations on religious psychopaths. You’ve known a few.”

  “Yes, indeedy. I liked them.”

  It threw me. “Weren’t they hard to control … being in the service of the divine and all?” For ten years in the Institute my brother had made a study of the shattered minds around him and turned it into a game: Seeing how fully he could enter their skewed landscapes and make them do his bidding. It was fiercely dangerous and more than once he’d been infected by their madnesses.

  “Not that hard, Carson,” he said. “The trick is to figure out their personal symbology and use it to speak their language. Once you know that, you always find them governed by very strict rules.”

  “How about you go someplace quiet and call me back, Jeremy. We can talk.”

  “How about you send me candy and I’ll munch a while?”

  I almost groaned. By candy my brother meant case files, reports, photos. He especially enjoyed photographs of crime scenes.

  “No need, Jeremy. It’s just a broad question about—”

  “You know I have a sweet tooth, Carson,” he said softly. “Feed it or you’re on your own.”

  “They’ll be there in an hour,” I growled. “Stay by your damned computer.”

  I checked on Belafonte, gathering all the low-hanging fruit on Hallelujah Jubilee, so absorbed in her work she didn’t see me. I sent Jeremy thirty or so pages, plus a dozen photos. I figured my brother would need several hours to start making conclusions.

  After a half-hour I returned to see what Belafonte had unearthed.

  “Here’s what I have from the internet, Detective. Hallelujah Jubilee opened eight years ago. It had a rocky financial start, loans coming due before much income was generated. It now seems a moderately successful enterprise. The park is a non-profit overseen by the Crown of Glory broadcasting network, headquartered in Jacksonville.”

  “What’s Schrum’s part?”

  “He and his wife started the network operation almost forty years ago from a tiny thousand-watt station in the middle of nowhere. She died several years back, cancer. Schrum’s chairman of the board … the front man for a big band.”

  “But Johnson runs the whole show?”

  “The business side at least. I don’t think Schrum goes near it: he’s the spiritual leader, the holy centerpiece.”

  Bobby Erickson pushed open the door. “Gotta call, Carson. A Doctor Faustus.”

  “Thanks, Bobby,” I said. “I’ll take it in my office.”

  I trotted the hall to my office, closed the door and sat, looking at my watch. “Forty minutes, Jeremy? I expected it would take longer.”

  “You have an afflicted fellow out there. A very religious upbringing, the word severe comes to mind, like being beaten senseless while Mummy or Daddy told him how diseased and evil he was. Do you know the effect that can have on a young mind?” He paused, then screamed, “WHERE ARE YOU HIDING, YOU MISERABLE LITTLE BASTARD?”

  I froze. It was my dead father’s voice. Jeremy could mimic it perfectly. For a split second I was nine years old and hiding in a closet while our father raged through the halls, his insane anger like black lightning blasting apart our house.

  “Jeremy—” I rasped. “Don’t start with the—”

  My brother cut me off with, “I TOLD YOU NO GODDAMN ANIMALS IN THIS HOUSE!”

  Words from my tenth birthday, our father clutching the pet hamster I’d kept hidden under my bed, slamming it into the wall as if pitching a baseball.

  My palms were sweating as I found my voice.

  “Stop it, Jeremy, or I’m hanging up.”

  My brother’s normal voice resumed. “I was simply setting the stage, Carson. You’ve been there, I’ve been there. But as nasty as dear ol’ Da could be, he never made us dirty in the eyes of God. He must not have thought of it. We both escaped relatively intact, mentally speaking. This unfortunate fellow didn’t. He’s been so soaked in religion all he sees is good and evil, God and the Devil. It’s Manichaean, the world a constant struggle between dark and light, expressed in Christian symbolism. Your burning boy has a thing about women, making me suspect it was Mommy who sparked his torments. I think he sees women as evil, but not condemned to hell, not if he can help it. Maybe he’s saving Mommy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s killing the women’s evil powers with the stonings. But it’s akin to an exorcism, their redemption coming when he wraps them in the lamb – how’s that for fun? – consecrates them with sacred oil, splashes them with the biblical magic-fire of naphtha, and flicks his Bic. I’d bet my next week’s stock profits he has an altar somewhere. He’d need the ritual aspect.”

  “Wasn’t it Jesus who said let he without sin cast the first stone? If the perp’s so Bible-driven …” I let the question hang.

  “He’ll have a mental construct to bypass it, Carson. A justification, some sort of special dispensation from God or Christ. He is, after all, saving women from their evil natures.”

  “Thanks, Jeremy. That might be a help in my—”

  “Now,” he interrupted, “what aren’t you telling me?”

  I paused. “What, uh, do you mean?”

  “I saw the data and the pictures. Give the forensics photographers a huzzah from me, Brother, excellent composition. And you did happen to notice the faint cross in the sand under the one body, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Excellent. But what little details aren’t in the reports?”

  I thought it out; no harm done to tell him the latest. “We have a link between the cases: the victims had all been employed at a religious theme park up by Lakeland, Hallelujah Jubilee.”

  A pause so long I wondered if we’d been cut off.

  “Jeremy?” I said. “You still there?”

  “You realize, Carson, that the fellow who founded the enterprise is supposedly dying down my block?”

  “Schrum’s based out of Jacksonville, and the Crown of Glory network operates the park as a non-profit. I can’t see a—”

  “Maybe you should ask your old partner what he knows.”

  “Harry? Why Harry?”

  “There’s a house behind the Schrum edifice that seems rented by folks in the righteous Rev’s entourage, comings and goings at all hours. Limousines, Hummers. Stern-faced men carrying bibles and briefcases. The Winklers. Attractive young people I assume to be staffers. A goofy
and ever-present fellow dressed like Gene Autry. That’s a classical allusion to a—”

  “I know who Gene Autry is. The point being?”

  “Your Mr Nautilus is part of the proceedings. I saw him at the house three days ago.”

  Jeremy had never met Harry. My brother was either deluded or jerking me around. “What makes you think that?”

  “He was in the neighborhood and reading a newspaper. He offered it to me, points for civility.”

  “No way. Couldn’t have been Harry.”

  “Does Nautilus have some form of chauffeurly duties? He was leaning against a Hummer as he read, as if the vehicle was his charge.”

  I stiffened. Only a handful of people knew Harry was driving for the Owsleys. And he’d joked about the Hummer and the hush-hush nature of the job. Was my brother telling the truth?

  “You talked to him?” I asked.

  “He was quite polite and hid his confusion.”

  “Confusion at what?”

  “You favor Mama, looks-wise, I favor sweet old Da … but there is a resemblance between us, n’est pas?”

  “He recognized you?”

  “He’s never met me. He saw a ghost in my cheekbones, my jawline. We both have rather sturdy jaws, right? And dazzling smiles, like the one I’m wearing now.”

  44

  I called Harry’s cell phone. He answered on the sixth ring. “You don’t usually call when working, so I expect you have the day off.”

  “Nope, I’m working. Tell me what you see.”

  “Uh, what?”

  “What you’re looking at, Harry. Your vista.”

  “Is this a game?”

  “It’s dead serious, accent on dead, which is why I’m so serious.”

  “What’s going on, Carson?” His turn to be serious.

  “Are you in Key West, Harry? I know you were there a few days ago. Something to do with that old preacher who’s giving up the ghost – Schrum.”

  A pause. “How do you know that?”

  “My crystal ball. And if you don’t ’fess up I’m going to send the flying monkeys after you.”

  “I’m not in Key West, Carson. I’m in Central Florida.”

  “How are things at Hallelujah Jubilee?”

  A perplexed pause. “OK, Carson. What the hell is going on?”

  “Remember what Clair used to say about synchronicity?”

  “There are no coincidences,” he recited, “because everything links in a fantastical web so far beyond human knowledge it’d be like an ant walking across Einstein’s calculations on special relativity. The ideas are supporting the insect, but so far beyond the ant’s comprehension that—”

  “We’ve got a freaky situation here, brother, and you being at Hallelujah Jubilee has dropped another ant on the calculations. Wanna get together for a drink in a few minutes?”

  “Where are you?”

  “Miami.”

  “A few minutes? We’re two hundred miles apart.”

  “Where you want to meet?” I looked at my watch. “Let’s say in forty-five minutes.”

  I’d banked on luck and got it: the departmental chopper was free and twenty minutes later I was watching the Everglades sweep past a half-mile below, green and blue and blazing with reflected sunlight. In no time I was over farmland and roads and clusters of housing developments, close enough to earth to see heads crane upward as we roared northward in the Bell chopper.

  Harry had suggested a bar-restaurant in St Cloud, about ten miles from where he was staying. There was a small airstrip in town, and I jumped from the chopper, jogged fifty paces, and was in the mighty bear hug of my amigo.

  “You’re on a case that has to do with the park? Jeez, Carson, what the hell—”

  “First let’s get somewhere I can grab a brew and a burger. A nap would be nice, too, but I don’t think that’s in the plan.”

  We jumped in a big bright Hummer and five minutes later were in Joker’s Lounge, a single-story block building with knotty-pine walls, tables steadied by matchbooks, a television playing sports over a Formica-topped bar, swiveling stools that creaked, a pinball machine beside a jukebox … Plato’s original form for the American roadhouse. The grilled cheeseburgers were in the concept, too – thick and dripping and if you ate more than two a week you’d need your veins flushed with muriatic acid.

  When beef and grease and beer had refreshed my brain, I laid out the details to Harry.

  “Stoned?” he said, eyes wide. “Jesus. You mean like—”

  “Pelted with rocks large enough to break bones, crack skulls. The pain would have been excruciating.”

  “All of the women worked at Hallelujah Jubilee?”

  “We have proof, though the head dog lied about two of them. I think he would have lied about all three, but we were ahead of him on one vic.”

  “What did the women do, Carson?”

  “Part of the park’s schtick is having actors in period costume. Robes and sandals and whatnot. People take pictures … a lot of them.”

  He popped a fry in his mouth and nodded. “The phones and cameras never stop. But how do you know?”

  “Some of it came from a guy named Hayes Johnson. For the rest Belafonte and I took a trip on the Google express.”

  “Johnson? Never heard of him.”

  “Johnson’s the CEO of the network and seems awfully camera-shy for a business leader, but Belafonte dug up a shot from an annual meeting three years back.”

  I pulled my iPad and called up a photo of a big guy behind a podium, smiling like his racehorse just cinched the Kentucky Derby.

  “Saw the guy once.” Harry nodded. “But was never introduced. He was present when I first dropped Owsley off in Key West. How’d you know I was there, by the way?”

  I’d never told Harry about Jeremy’s Byzantine trip to semi-normalcy in Key West; as far as he knew, my brother was still hiding in Kentucky. Now wasn’t the time to get sidetracked.

  I said, “That’s one I’ll have to hold close for a bit.”

  Harry looked into my eyes and nodded, knowing I’d have a reason. “What do you need from me?” he asked without losing a beat.

  “You seeing anything, or are you always behind a wheel?”

  “I’m seeing stuff that doesn’t make a lot of sense. There’s a building, about five stories tall, lashed together quickly. Owsley goes there every day. I think it’s some form of religious gig.” Harry told me about the Owsley guy’s talking-in-tongues act with the big box.

  “Weird. What’s in the building … you know?”

  A grin, but only in Harry’s eyes. “I’m not supposed to.”

  “You creeped the place, right?”

  “Last night. It was too much to resist.”

  “You found something interesting?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing but parts for a ride, some streamlined thing. Track. Usual construction equipment.”

  “Owsley’s doing all that ritual stuff for a damn ride?”

  Harry closed his eyes and held his hands together as if in prayer. “May God in Heaven fulfill abundantly the prayers which are pronounced over you and your boats and equipment …”

  “Ah,” I said. “Got it.” Harry was reciting from the Blessing of the Fleet, an annual event in Bayou La Batre, Alabama, the shrimp boats gathering for an invocation against harm, the blessing delivered with much pomp and majesty by a Roman Catholic priest. Harry was saying different strokes for different folks, just in his own inimitable way.

  “I also saw a bit of curiousness a couple days back,” he said. “There’s a park worker named Tawnya – you only get first names here – who’s all smiles and sunshine and happy days forever, but I saw her bitch-slap a low-level worker and dole out a mean-ass cussing.”

  “Low-level like what … janitor? Landscaper?”

  Harry leaned forward, his voice low. “No, brother … get this: the person she was kicking around was one of the role players.”

  I stared. “Like my three victims.
”

  “Seems so.”

  “Can you keep your eyes open, Harry? Maybe even get a little, uh, proactive.”

  “I don’t have the shield,” Harry said, meaning no law-enforcement membership, and thus no protection from getting caught in places he shouldn’t be. Still, he followed his final bite of burger with a wink. “But I’ll do what I can.”

  “Amos nearly went outside, Hayes.” Uttleman pinched his thumb and forefinger a half-inch apart. “It was that close.”

  The pair stood on the back porch of the Schrum house, the security guard sent to fetch sandwiches, more to keep him away than for hunger.

  “You said he was drunk?”

  “Plastered. He wanted to confess.” Uttleman closed his eyes. “He said he was burdened.”

  “Andy stopped him?”

  “He stood there in his little-boy pajamas and convinced Amos to stay inside.”

  Johnson shook his head and watched a gull flick through the blue sky above.

  “How?”

  “You ever see how the kid’s eyes light up when Amos steps into the room? Andy worships Amos.”

  “So do a lot of people,” Johnson scoffed. “Donations are up thirty-seven per cent.”

  “True, Hayes, but it’s like it’s … different with Andy. He never wants anything back. I think Amos looks at Andy like he’s a clean spirit”. They’re confidants, they pray together. Uttleman paused. “Maybe it’s what’s holding Amos together.”

  Johnson leaned the porch rail, arms crossed and looking down a head’s-height to Uttleman. “You think singer-boy can keep Amos together another four days?”

  “Four days?” The physician’s eyes widened. “It’s happening that soon?”

  “It’s what Eliot wants, no way around it. He’s pouring money into the project like water, had the fabricators working three shifts. The bottom assembly’s arriving tomorrow, the last piece. It’ll take two days of crane work to fit everything together.”

  “And Owsley?”

  “Our Mobile pastor’s come to, uh, understand Eliot. And conform himself to that understanding. In return, he’s the newest member of the COG family, soon to receive a daily show in mid-afternoon. I expect much of our new brother.”