by Alex Dolan
When I visited Helena Mumm, she talked fondly about a garden that she and Walter tended. A garden she tended with their kids. I imagined what that might mean now. Then, I remembered Leland’s son emptying his guts in the bathroom. “Why are you doing this? It can’t be healthy for Veda.”
“You think I don’t know my own son? I know it’s hard for him to see this.”
I accused. “Then why the hell do you do it?”
He rubbed his eyes. “Because I get to give those people hope.”
“You’re hunting for dead bodies. How is that hope?”
“It’s the hope that they might have closure. It’s a form of hope. And there’s always the tiniest chance that I’m wrong, and that their kids are alive. And if that happens it will bring me a joy that I can’t describe.”
“Why does it have to be you?”
“Because I never had hope.” He clarified. “Tesmer always held out that Veda was still alive. She always believed it. And I knew I had to fake it, so I’d go along with her and tell her he’d be coming back to us any day. But I knew—I knew. I’d worked on enough of these cases to know my son was dead. And it was the loneliest feeling in the world.” He let me sit with that for a moment. “Look—most of those people down there are in the same boat. They’ve lost blood. The last time they saw their child, he or she was a child. If they’d have grown up, they’d be your age or older. But those kids probably died as kids, and they’re still children in the minds of their families. When a child gets taken…it’s the worst thing someone can go through. Believe it. Sometimes the parents stick together, but not always. Some friends will stay loyal—but not all of them. You don’t have the community behind you the way you think you would, because the mere fact that your child went missing casts you in a suspicion that you never shake. Your neighbors—even your church—might think you killed them. And even if you didn’t kill them yourself, somehow you screwed up and let them be killed.” He set up a straw man so he could give me a taste of how his network of friends and colleagues had turned against him. “I mean, what kind of parent would let this happen to his own kid? A child’s a responsibility, right? So anyone who is negligent enough to let this happen to his child deserves it.” He rocked back on his chair. “If you’d lived through it, you’d know. You can’t untaint the taint.”
“So nothing changed when you found Veda?”
“I didn’t find Veda,” he said bitterly. I caught his frustration, understandable from an FBI agent who couldn’t find his own child. His shame ran so deep he didn’t want to articulate it, only adding, “It was luck. That and the colossal balls of my son to write that note hanging on the wall.”
“Your church really asked you to leave?”
“The reverend asked us to take some time off.”
“Have you gone back?”
“We switched churches,” he said.
“What happened to you as a family…you’re sure that’s what happens to all those families down there?”
“More or less from what they tell me. Hopefully, what we do makes it less bumpy than it was for Tesmer and me.”
“But this hurts Veda.”
“I’m doing it for Veda as much as anyone else. This isn’t putting him through hell—my son is in hell. I’m trying to get him out. I expect him to be uncomfortable, but I’m doing this because I love him.”
I scanned the layers of paper on the walls. “Does Veda ever come up here?”
“Hell no.” He slid out the bottom desk drawer. “That’s why we keep these up here.” I nosed over and saw a bundle of forks. Dinner and salad forks, probably sixteen, enough for eight servings. Leland picked up a salad fork. Twinkling off the prongs, the streetlights gave it the illusion of sharpness. “My boy has a phobia of these. Forks of all things.”
“Why didn’t you just get rid of them?” I asked.
“Because I want him to get over this, eventually. But my son is a fragile young man, Kali. At this point, you’ve seen enough to know that.” I nodded to acknowledge this. “You know, I went to Cal. Got both degrees there—bachelor’s and my JD. In a perfect world, I would let all this go and spend my Saturdays having a few beers with my son at the Cal game. But you know what? Every time there’s a touchdown and that cannon goes off at the stadium, my son almost craps his pants.” He dropped the fork back in the drawer, and it rattled like coinage when it hit the other utensils.
“What’s the FBI’s role in this?”
His tone sharpened. “The FBI doesn’t know I’m doing this. I wouldn’t host a barbecue for victim’s families as part of an FBI investigation—come on. These are cold cases. What we’re doing here is a volunteer effort.”
“So no one in the bureau is working with you?”
“No one would want to touch this.”
I didn’t want to steer the conversation, but this was my first chance to test whether I could be free. “Was the FBI ever investigating me?”
“Of course it was.”
“How did you find me?”
“I’m what they call a squad leader—drug squad. We found the guy who was selling you the thiopental and pancuronium. Haven’t heard from him in a while, have you?”
His name was Dylan, and someone from the network initially found him for me. “I’m not in touch with him that often. I guess it’s been a few months. He gave you my name?”
“Not exactly. He kept a journal—you were the only person he sold those drugs to. No one else made anything of it, but I know those aren’t recreational. I was curious to see who would bulk order chemicals that they use in lethal injections.”
“Is anyone else curious?”
Leland assured me, “The bureau can live with another cold case.”
I bought the conversation back around. “Walter never confessed to any of this.”
“He played the crazy card. He never outright confessed to anything. All that babbling about demons giving him urges—it wasn’t a confession. He never gave us anything useful. Helena played the victim all along. It didn’t work for her at first—she got sent up. But in the end it paid off. The parole board thought of her as a disease-addled woman who wasn’t in her right mind. Because they felt like if a woman was head over heels for her own brother, by definition she couldn’t possibly be in her right mind. I believe they were wrong about her.”
“You think killing Helena Mumm would help you bring Veda to a Cal game?”
He leaned back and fingered his chin. “You keep thinking I wanted you to kill Helena Mumm, but all I asked for was an injection.”
“What are you trying to say? I know what was in that needle.” Some chemical hallucinogen called pharmahuasca. I didn’t know much about it other than what I found through Jeffrey’s lab tech.
“The beauty of working on drug squad, you find out about all kinds of things.”
Leland unlocked his top desk drawer, which might normally store highlighters and binder clamps. “If you know what it was, you know it wasn’t a poison.” He pulled out a ziplock plastic bag full of what looked like vitamin capsules. “Aya,” he said. “Aya, for short. Although this isn’t ayahuasca so much as—”
“Pharmahuasca. A synthetic version.”
“What do you know about it?”
“It’s peyote with an edge.”
He admired what was in his bag. I kept thinking about the moral code that the FBI is reputed to have among its agents. Possibly it was a myth, or Leland Moon may have just strayed from that code to keep illegal narcotics in his desk drawer. “To cook up the organic version, you’d usually need a shaman. He’d mix it up and you’d smoke it during a ritual. You’re right about the synthetic version—this version—being more potent. Sort of like the difference between mushrooms and LSD. You extract the DMT—that’s dimethytryptamine—and refine the drug to a purer form. It’s soluble in water. Mix it with a saline solution and it’s even injectable. It lasts for up to twelve hours or so, and you go through extreme visions. Twelve hours of nightmares so vivid yo
u can touch them.”
“You’ve tried it.”
“Of course I did. I had to find out what it would be like.” So this was something that Leland Moon had in common with Jeffrey Holt. “It was the single most terrifying event of my life, and that includes my own son being taken from me. Because at least Veda’s kidnapping was grounded in the known world. This stuff,” he said as he held it against the window light, “is like being sent to hell.”
“Aren’t FBI agents supposed to be drug free?”
“Don’t tell anyone,” he winked at me, so casual about breaking a bureau commandment.
“How did you get that?”
“We’re in Berkley, California. Throw a rock and you’ll hit someone who’s studied with a shaman.” He tugged his clear plastic tote like a puppeteer. “These goodies came off a bust in Richmond.”
“Why would you give this to Helena Mumm?”
“Because while I experienced this drug, I would have told anyone anything. I would have been too terrified to keep anything secret. This drug can show you your past lifetimes from the dawn of history. I followed myself back to Africa. Given that perspective, any secrets you’ve got bottled up seem trivial.” He tossed the bag on his desktop papers. “The plan was to have you go, administer the injection as if it were her diabetes medication.” He rubbed exercise calluses on his palm. “I planned to go visit her thirty minutes later after the chemicals kicked in.”
“You were going to interrogate her?”
Leland nodded. “I need to find those kids.” He gestured to the map, at all the green pushpins. “I want a location.”
“Why did you need me?”
“We can’t just go and ask her. We tried asking her for over a decade. We needed someone Helena didn’t know, and, frankly, we needed someone who didn’t know Helena. Someone who could be in the same room with her without losing their cool. I wouldn’t have been able to get anywhere near her.”
“You couldn’t overpower her and give her an injection?”
“You know what happened when I went back to the house? She’d woken up by then. She heard me prowling around the door and threatened to shoot me.”
“She could barely get out of her chair.”
“Don’t be fooled. Helena Mumm is extremely dangerous. When we took her into custody, she stabbed one of the agents in the thigh. But even if I could overpower her, I wouldn’t trust that it would work. We can’t go back to Helena, because she already knows we tried to pull something. If she gets that we’re doing something to her, she could clam up just to spite us.”
“Even with this drug in her?”
“Helena Mumm would kill herself rather than talk to me about anything. She’s extremely defiant. The closest we ever came to a confession was when she was sedated. This was when we first had her in custody. There was a moment when she caught a whiff of the enormity of what she’d done and might have felt some remorse. You saw the video.”
I remembered the video Leland had shown me back when Helena Mumm was supposed to be his sister. Rocking in her folding chair, she’d wept into the camera, claiming, “I want to die.”
“If we got her in that state again, I thought we had a better shot of drawing out the truth. Now, we’ve missed that element of surprise with Helena. That makes Walter our best option.”
I recalled that afternoon’s visit to San Sebastián. “Haven’t you already hatched some kind of trade with him? Why can’t you just get the information that way?”
“I once traded Walter Internet privileges, more time in the yard, and even a boat ride in the San Francisco Bay. He gave us information in return that had us digging up by Point Reyes for three days. I can’t trust he’ll give us good information, even in a trade. You understand, I’ve thought about this quite a bit.” He jostled his bag of synthetic shaman dope. “I wouldn’t have come up with a complicated solution without exhausting the simple ones first.”
I hated that I was coming to this understanding so late, and furious at Leland for not having explained this to me earlier. “Helena was never going to die.”
“That was never part of the plan. So long as she’s alive, she could have things to tell us. Even if she never does, there’s always the possibility.”
“You couldn’t have explained this to me when we first met?”
“If I’d told you anything, Helena would have seen you trying to act out the lie. It was easier if you were just Kali.” After a break, he followed with, “Keep in mind that whatever I did to coerce you, I didn’t do anything monstrous.”
“Think so?”
“Sure, you peed your pants in front of me, but look at my son. I see that every few weeks. When we met, all I knew about you was that you’d probably killed several people. I didn’t want to confide in you. I didn’t trust you. All this,” he gestured to the walls, “is unofficial. I didn’t want you to know about this. I didn’t want you to know about my family. Believe it or not, it’s been as hard for me to trust you as it has been for you to trust me. Consider that.”
Leland saw how uncomfortable I was. I crossed and uncrossed my legs, shifting in that beanbag. He said, “Listen, you could go home right now and that would be the end of it. I’ve already deleted your profile off the registry.”
“The sex offender registry? So, I’m no longer a sex offender? Happy day.”
“You’ve kept your end of the trade, and you can go if you want. I won’t come after you. But if you help us, you’d be helping more than me. You’d be doing something for all these families.” He paused, unsure whether to articulate his next thought. “And you wouldn’t have to kill anyone.”
He’d offered a desperate plea, his voice weighed down by fatiguing years of struggle. Maybe the sangria had opened me up to suggestion.
“For the sake of argument, if I helped, how would it work? We go into San Sebastián prison and I narc up Walter Gretsch for you?” I laughed at the thought of breaking into a prison. I tipped to the side on my beanbag chair and laughed in a quake I couldn’t rein.
Leland stayed serious. “I think you know that’s a bad idea. Why’s that?”
“It belittles us both for me to explain why that’s a bad idea.” I mean, where would I begin?
He said, “There are two issues at play. First, whether this is feasible. Second, whether you have the will to do it. Now, pretend for a moment we could. Would you be willing?” He sensed my churning thoughts. “This isn’t a snap decision, but it should be. Will you think about it?”
I wasn’t sure how much there was to think about. Aside from busting into a state prison, I didn’t know what the plan was or what my role in it would be, other than to stick a needle into Walter Gretsch. The last of my cheesy grin disappeared. I thought about the families downstairs, and the original premise that led me to my work—to ease suffering. Out of respect for all the suffering they’d endured, I forced myself not to dismiss this as absurd. “I need more information.”
Chapter 13
Leland left me alone after changing the sheets, and I got comfortable. Emmanuel stayed up here, and the puppy sniffed at my bare toes.
The low-watt clip lamp hung under the eaves. Right above me, an ambitious nest of cobwebs stretched across that corner, its builder long vacant. I propped myself up on pillows and gnawed on a pen as I leafed through a few folders Leland had put together for me. Occasionally I looked out the window at the lit houses tiered on the hills. I wondered if I made a mistake staying there.
Many of the reports were formatted like tax forms, so hard to glean information. Some of the documents were copies of handwritten notes and Xerox copies of photographs. Leland had gathered an image catalog of the missing children. Some of them were school portraits. Some were cropped with a cutoff shoulder, hinting that a full family had been in the original frame. The girls were at the age where they were losing baby teeth and some had gap-toothed smiles, proud of their dental voids because they hadn’t matured to the age where they would be aware of their looks. Cindy
Coates was in there. Her inert delight infectious even at that age, she seemed like a pinball of energy, photographed during the one moment she managed to sit still. I found Veda too. He’d been a gerbil-cheeked kid who grinned like he was trying to get away with something. He’d leaned out like his father after this photo was taken.
Veda and the girls stayed in a shed during the day, with no lights and a dirt floor. They were let out to have dinner at the house. Walter threatened that he would kill their families if any of them tried to run away. Helena preceded each meal by saying grace, always a prayer of gratitude for their new family.
Weeks passed. Instead of threatening to kill their families, Walter now told them all that their families had given up looking for them. Over the next several months, Walter and Helena used a number of methods to ensure compliance. The neighbors had loud dogs, and Walter told the children that the dogs were trained to tear them apart in case they ran. The shed got hot during the day, and the dehydration kept them tired and meek. During meals, Walter and Helena sometimes slipped alcohol into their drinks to makes them woozy. Even with all that wearing down their resistance, they sometimes behaved in a way that displeased the adults. When that happened, Helena bent them over their chairs and jabbed them with a dinner fork. Veda acted out more than the other two.
Eventually, Julie tried to escape and Cindy went with her. Veda was too scared to go. Hours later, Walter dragged Julie’s body into the shed, along with something else wrapped in a bloody pillowcase. Walter forced Veda to help dig a hole in the dirt floor. Horrified and numb, Veda dug and covered Julie and the pillowcase with dirt. Cindy was returned to the shed days later, bandaged with part of her leg missing. She remained catatonic for days, and she didn’t say much after she did talk.
Veda didn’t act out after that, although it didn’t stop the bad things from happening. He stayed monastically silent and obedient to a fault. As a reward, they brought Veda into the house and gave him a bedroom. Cindy remained in the shed, coming out for meals, or plucked out at Walter’s whim. Veda began calling them “Mom” and “Dad.” More rewards were gifted, usually more food or an extra shower. Walter experimented with a few trips to the grocery store, holding his hand tightly so he wouldn’t run. Those went well, and then Veda accompanied Walter without needing his hand held.
