The Program (4 page)

The top explosive-detection canines, Precious and Chomper, whimpered at Tim's scent, tails wagging, but they'd been put on a sit-stay, so they didn't run to greet him. Reacting to his dogs, Supervisory Deputy Brian Miller stood to look over the barrier. The others followed suit, rising to their feet and staring, curiosity overcoming tact. A few new faces made Tim's hiatus all the more acute.

A current of whispers followed him to his new desk, empty save a faded blotter and a crumpled Doritos bag. The wood partition provided him momentary respite from the stares. He set the S&W on the blotter and stared at it, weighing for a moment the significance of putting on a weapon again.

Then he looped several rubber bands around the fore end of the grip, just below the hammer. He slid the gun in the back of his pants above his right kidney, the grip out, ready for the draw. The rubber bands kept it from slipping beneath his waistband.

He removed the Marshals star from his back pocket and studied it. Last night he'd called to quit his security gig. His supervisor's only interest had been getting back the uniform and baton. That Tim was so eminently replaceable was apt commentary on the worthlessness of what he'd been doing over the past year.

A massive thunk hit Tim's back, startling him from his self-loathing. Bear's voice boomed over his shoulder. "You know why they put a circle around that star?"

A faint smile crossed Tim's lips. "So it's easier for them to shove up your ass."

He turned to stand and was swept up in a turbulent hug. Until last year Tim and Bear had partnered on the warrant squad's Escape Team and served together on the SWAT-like Arrest Response Team. Though he was nine years older than Tim, Bear looked up to him and Dray like older siblings. A loner with many friends and few intimates, he'd been an uncle to Ginny. Tim had once saved his life and been awarded the Medal of Valor for it. Bear had returned the favor by being the most unerringly loyal friend Tim had.

Over by the coffeemaker, Denley muttered something and Bear shot him a hard stare over the top of the barrier. "Fuck off, Denley. You got something to say, get your ass over here and say it."

Denley held up a sagging coffee filter. "Actually, Jowalski, I was just complaining that some numbnut left the old filter in."

Some of the noble indignation leaked out of Bear. "Oh," he said.

Tim smiled for the first time since entering the building. "I really appreciate you easing my transition here."

Bear lowered himself into a nearby sliding chair, spilling over it in all directions like a rhino on a unicycle. "Tannino briefed me yesterday. I already followed up the groundballers. There's nothing on the PI, Katanga. Just vanished."

"The girl?"

"Ran the usual suspects on Leah Henning -- phone, gas, power, water, and broadband. All last-knowns trace to an apartment in Van Nuys. Here's the address. I spoke to the manager -- cranky old broad. Leah skipped her lease March fifteenth, left the security deposit behind."

Two days after her visit home.

"No forwarding info, no new bills in her name. She just blinked off the radar." Bear coughed into a fist. "What do you have?"

"Not a damn thing."

"Well, that's why you're here. To make magic outta moleshit." Bear wiped his hand on his pant leg. "The P.O. box checked out to the San Fernando office, just north of Van Nuys, where the girl lived. I guess if we get desperate, we can sit someone on it, but I'm not sure Tannino'll give up the manpower for a low-odds angle this early in the game."

"The PI already gave it a go with no luck. Let's save that for a last-ditch."

Bear flattened the chips bag with his hand and seemed disappointed to find it empty. "These cults pull some intense shit. Didn't you do some mind-control mumbo jumbo in Ranger training?"

"Biofeedback stuff mostly, to teach us to control our thoughts, balance our emotional responses, mediate our pain reactions."

Bear wore the dubious expression he generally reserved for discussing political correctness and tax hikes. "How'd they do that?"

"They stuck us with needles and put probes up our asses. We'd joke that we got lost at the Blue Oyster Bar from Police Academy."

The white coats had taught him to focus on his breathing, his heart rate, even his body temperature. Eventually he could lower them at will, even when the techs were giving him mild shocks or pricking his fingertips with needles. They'd kept cardiac leads all over him, hooked into a computer; his task was to lower his blood pressure and make pink dots disappear from the screen. The aim, one walleyed tech bragged, was to regulate his adrenaline response, to disconnect the wiring of his fight-or-flight instinct. Four twenty-minute sessions a day, seven days a week.

When Tim finished, his core body temperature stayed at ninety-seven degrees.

"There is a shadow government." With effort, Bear pulled himself up off the chair. "Page me if you need me. I gotta chase down some jack-ass who walked out of an Inglewood halfway house after banging a cohabitant. Remember, it ain't all glamour."

He thundered off, hefting his pants by his belt.

Tim sat for a moment, elbows on his knees, head lowered. It took a while for the juices to get flowing, but the instinct returned like a remembered melody. He plucked the phone from the base, called the L.A. Times: Valley Edition and then the Weekly, asking for Classifieds. Newspapers were notoriously fastidious when it came to confidentiality, so he introduced himself both times as Lee Henning and complained that he'd been overcharged for a moving-sale ad he'd placed in the papers a few weeks ago. He was additionally pissed off because they'd misspelled his name. Neither paper could locate an ad. He came up blank at Pennysaver and Recycler but got a hit at the New Times, a lower-circulation rag that catered to students and the younger set.

"Yeah, right here," the clerk said. "Le ah Henning." A hiccup of a giggle. "Bet that confused the buyers, huh? It just ran once. You should've been charged thirty-five bucks."

"If memory serves, I was charged fifty."

"Nope." The sounds of fastidious keyboard clicking. "Got the bill right here."

"Can you fax me a copy of it? And the ad, too, while you're at it?"

He waited, fingers drumming on the desktop, until he heard the fax machine whirring across the room. Reluctant to ask his way around the new office, he followed the noise through the maze of desks. The papers awaited him in the tray.

A notation on the bill showed that Leah had paid the bill with cash, which struck Tim as odd and inconvenient. Tim had run through some specifics with Will last night while walking him and Emma to their car, and Will had mentioned he'd cut off Leah's credit cards. But she still, presumably, had a bank account with a checkbook. Unless she'd signed that over to the cult in addition to her trust fund.

Leah's ad, which had run nearly a month ago, offered a bureau, two nightstands, a bookcase, a mattress and frame, her bicycle, and an array of computer equipment. The sell-off fitted the profile of either a fugitive preparing to go underground or someone moving overseas. The latter, a distinct possibility, worried him. He didn't want to have to inform the Hennings that their daughter was hoeing fields in a cult colony in Tenerife.

More focused now, he headed out, mumbling to himself and drawing a few glances from his colleagues.

Chapter
three

Tim worked the phone on the drive up the coast, networking through contacts and eventually placing calls to the Leo J. Ryan Foundation, the Cult Information Service, and the American Family Foundation. When he informed the phone counselors that he needed to bring his teenager in for postcult therapy in Los Angeles, the same name topped all three referral lists: Dr. Glen Bederman, a UCLA psychology professor, one of the country's foremost cult authorities.

Tim dialed the number, keeping an eye on the winding road.

"You've reached the office of Glen Bederman. If this is a harassing phone call, please leave all slurs and deprecations after the beep. If you're suing me, please phone my lawyer, Jake C. Caruthers, directly at 471-9009. Process servers looking to locate me, here is my calendar for the week...." Listening to Bederman's lecture schedule and office hours, Tim couldn't help but smile. "I'd like to close with Articles Five and Eighteen of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: No one shall be subjected to torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment, and everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion. Good day."

After the prolonged beep that indicated a surfeit of messages, Tim introduced himself briefly and mentioned he'd try to catch up with the professor later that day.

Next he reached the postal inspector in charge of San Fernando -- a nasally voiced fellow who introduced himself as Owen B. Rutherford.

"Yes," Rutherford said with thinly disguised irritation, "I recall fielding questions about this particular already."

"I was just wondering if you'd consider --"

"You should know better, Deputy. Bring me a warrant and I'll arrange a time to see to your concerns."

"Look, work with me here a little. I don't have enough for a warrant --"

"Not enough evidence for a warrant, yet you want me to root through privileged billing and registration information?"

Rutherford's prissy tone was surprising, but his vehemence was not -- postal inspectors were 1811s, investigators who toted guns and tracked leads hard. They had a near-fanatical regard for the mails, which Tim respected though found difficult when it inconvenienced him. Realizing he lacked good reason for his frustration, he held his tongue.

"The mails are sacrosanct, Deputy. I'd like you to consider something for a minute...." Rutherford's voice, high and thin, took on the tone of a rant. "People only complain about the mail. When it's late, when it arrives damaged, when some unwashed misanthrope uses it to deliver anthrax. Think about the fact that for thirty-seven cents -- thirty-seven cents -- less than the price of a pack of gum, you can send a letter from Miami to Anchorage. Thirty-seven cents can buy one ounce a four-thousand-mile trip. This country has the finest mail system in history," Owen B. Rutherford continued, seeming pleased to have secured a scapegoat for what Tim could only imagine was an elephantine bad day. "We move forty percent of the world's mail, seven hundred million pieces a day, and -- unlike you big-budget DOJ agencies -- we're entirely self-supporting. This country runs on its postal service. Taxes are paid, votes are tallied, medicines delivered in our mail system. And that system has got to be an asymptote approaching the line of perfection. Imagine if your paycheck arrived only two times out of three. Imagine spending your last minutes on your deathbed hand-penning a draft of your will that had only a fifty-percent chance of making it to your attorney. Imagine, for that matter, a confidential P.O. box that you establish for the receipt of documents or personal items, only to find that some knuckle-scraping federal employee with an inadequate grasp of civil liberties called in favors from a corrupt postal inspector so that your political petitions, or inflatable sheep, or letter from your dying !Kung aunt" -- this complete with tongue click -- "in the Kalahari is suddenly a matter of illegal government inquiry!"

"I, uh..."

"Good day, Deputy Rackley."

Tim sat for a minute, a dazed grin touching his face. He couldn't recall being so effectively and summarily told off since Ms. Alessandri benched him in fifth grade for supergluing the donkey tail to Tina Mindachi during end-of-year festivities. He tossed the phone in the passenger seat, deciding to enjoy the rest of the ride.

The Pacific Coast Highway hugged the coast to Malibu, affording a continuous panoramic view of the gray-blue ocean. The best lawn in Los Angeles stretched back from the intersection of PCH and Malibu Canyon, steeply inclined acres of grass above which the campus rose like a fortified city. After contending with a militant parking attendant, Tim wound his inferior Integra through the main drag lined with Beemers and Saabs. He asked a gardener -- the sole person of color he'd glimpsed on campus -- for the Sigma dorm.

A remarkably attractive blonde answered the door. Her face was structured like a model's -- high cheekbones, generous jaw, abbreviated ski jump of a nose. The orange-and-blue scrunchie holding her hair back in a ponytail matched her Pepperdine sweatshirt; the pullover itself featured King Neptune looming with trident and flowing beard, the school's umpteenth stab at personifying its banal mascot -- waves. She tilted her head slightly so she could look up at him through her lashes, a well-practiced move. "Who are you?"

"I'd like to speak with Katie Kelner."

The girl rolled her eyes and leaned back, letting the door swing open. Inside, three surfers were sprawled shirtless on a futon with another girl, an equally attractive redhead. Tim felt as if he'd stepped into a Gap ad. One of the guys tossed a beach towel over a bong smoldering on the coffee table.

"That's me," the blonde said. "What do you want?"

"I need to ask you some questions about Leah Henning."

"Again? It's been, like, three months. Aren't you people over it?"

"Your concern is touching. Weren't you friends?"

Two of the surfer boys snickered, and the redhead cracked up, a lungful of held smoke bursting out of her.