A Darker Place (34 page)

Ana sat down in the pew behind them and waited for two elderly women making the rounds to struggle their way out the door.

“Hello, Glen,” she said over the back of the pew. “You look like a real snowbird, down from Nebraska for the winter.”

He shifted sideways and gave her a lopsided grin that went with the image. He didn’t have a cowlick but he looked as if he did, and Ana was briefly visited by the memory of Antony Makepeace’s disparaging remarks concerning Glen’s undercover abilities. “Howdy, ma’am,” he said. “You know Agent Steinberg. My right-hand woman.”

“We met. Do you have a first name?” she asked the woman.

“Rayne.”

“Originally Rainbow?” Ana ventured.

Agent Steinberg actually blushed, an endearingly human reaction that caused Ana to wonder how far the woman would get in the Bureau. She was about the same age that Abby would have been, and for a moment Ana played with the amusing idea that one of the many hippie babies she had known named Rainbow might have become this young woman. “Never mind,” she told her. “None of us is responsible for our parents. Anything new from your end, Glen? You heard from Gillian, or that Dooley woman in Toronto?”

“Gillian has nothing new to offer—she’s got a loaded desk at the moment and has put the Change case on the back of it. And the Toronto situation is… frustrating. The woman’s community where she’s supposed to be is bristling with lawyers and there’s no way we can get a warrant to talk to her if she’s not interested. Rayne went up last week to have a try, and they just told her that they have too many women hiding out from their abusive husbands to want the FBI poking their snouts in. I quote.”

“is that why Samantha Dooley is there? Is she in hiding? And if so, from whom?”

“Who knows? There’s nothing on the books connected with her name, here, in Canada, or in the U.K. She just doesn’t want to talk to us, and so far we haven’t been able to find someone in the community who will. We’ll keep trying, of course.”

“Good luck. I, on the other hand, have had an interesting time.” She took the photocopies out of her coat pocket and handed them over the back of the pew. “Why don’t you two take a look at what I’ve written first? Save me going over it twice.”

Glen turned his back to her and unfolded the sheets. Ana leaned back and closed her eyes. She should have
had something to eat back in Sedona, she thought; it might have helped boost her blood sugar. She would stop off and get a large coffee before driving back, and buy something to eat then. Maybe that café next to the bookstore. Which reminded her, she had to pick up the Lewis Carroll book for Dulcie.

Pages rustled in front of her as Glen passed each one over to his assistant. The chapel was cold and a far cry from the old wooden building where she sometimes went with Antony Makepeace and his wife, Marla, for the Quaker services that passed for worship. Ana’s own rather more complicated relationship with God was personal, both spiritual and intellectual, with little room for the formal and liturgical. However, this place was too cerebral even for her.

Glen finished reading. She heard him shift on the seat, imagined his elbow coming over the back of the pew, felt him looking at her, but she did not move. She had gone as lethargic as a snake in winter, and wondered idly if she looked as decrepit as she felt.

“Alchemy,” Glen mused.

“’S a funny old world, ain’t it?” she replied, and opened her eyes to find him looking at her worriedly.

“Are you really feeling okay?”

“Ah, Glen, it’s a young woman’s game. Time to give it over to young Rainbow, here.”

Curious, she thought, how it was only during these odd moments in the course of an investigation that she actually liked Glen McCarthy. They smiled into each other’s eyes in brief but perfect understanding, and then she pulled herself upright and leaned forward, speaking quietly.

“I’d swear that Steven truly believes he created gold, but I know he also uses trickery to make his initiates think they’re doing the same thing, only with silver.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I saw the strings and mirrors. Or in this case, the wax.”

“Would you say he thinks he’s encouraging lesser minds?” Glen wondered. “Or just stringing along the marks?”

“Maybe a little of each. But he himself believes it is possible, that he and others have actually made silver and gold. That’s how I read him, anyway.”

He looked down at his knee and nodded. Rayne tapped the photocopied pages straight and folded them, but did not look around. Ana felt the tug of dread pulling at the edges of her mind, and sighed. “Okay, Glen, what’s going on? Why have you brought your assistant all the way out here instead of using the man I met in Prescott, and why are you bugging the phones? Is it this thing with the two children in England?”

“I don’t know what the hell’s going on in England. As you know, communication with foreign police departments isn’t always what one might wish, and in England something like this falls into the spaces between departments even more than it does here. So far it’s just the local Somerset police involved, and I don’t have any personal contacts on that force.” He shook his head. “No, the problem’s in Japan. A kid in the Yokohama Change center died about three weeks ago. You probably don’t want to know his name?”

“Not unless I have to.”

“I don’t think so. Anyway, we just found out about it on Monday and had the autopsy report faxed over and translated. They’re treating it as a mugging—he was a mass of bruises, found dumped by the roadside.”

Ana heard the emphasis on “they.” “You don’t agree that he was mugged.”

“All the boy’s bruises had diffuse edges—no sharp-edged marks such as you’d expect to find after someone was struck with, say, a bat or a board or kicked by a
shoe. Most of the bruises were along the sides and back of his upper torso and head, with a concentration on his shoulders. He may have been naked when the injuries occurred, because there were no marks on the skin from fabric or seams or buttons. His legs were not bruised other than his hips and knees, but his feet were badly damaged—he had three broken bones in his left foot. No defense marks on his arms, but all the fingernails on both hands were broken and bloody. Actual cause of death was a cerebral hemorrhage caused by the blows to the head.”

Ana did not hear the final sentence. The image of those destroyed fingernails, the clear picture she had of the Japanese boy clawing at something, kicking and throwing himself violently and repeatedly at some smooth, hard surface, rose up inside her and blotted all else out. All the blood in her body seemed to turn around and flow backward. She felt like vomiting, her head buzzed as if she were about to faint, and she stood up and stumbled rapidly away, unseeing, just to be moving.

She felt Glen’s hand on her back, felt his solid presence by her side, and wanted either to turn to his arms for comfort or beat at him for putting her there. He was saying something in a low, urgent voice and she was looking through the window at the hills beyond the cross, and she shuddered.

“God. I’ve got to get out of here, Glen. I need air.”

It was better outside, seated on a bench overlooking the world, with the clear desert breeze sweeping away the nausea and light-headedness and with Glen and Rayne standing between her and the curious tourists. Glen saw her begin to shiver and he took off his heavy jacket and wrapped it around her.

“I saw a death like that once,” he said quietly. “A kidnap victim closed into a shipping crate. Differences, of course. What did Change lock that boy into?”

“I don’t—He’s—Oh Christ.” Ana sat perfectly still for a long moment with her eyes clamped shut, and then sat up straight, took a deep, steadying breath, and, addressing herself to the red-rock cliffs, summoned the analytical words of Anne Waverly.

“As I told you, the doctrine of Change is based on alchemical beliefs concerning transmutation of substances into higher forms. Whether or not Change as a whole believes in the actual production of gold is still open to question, but in its metaphysical form—the transformation of human beings—it permeates the Change creed.

“The alchemist believes that a person can transform base matter using heat and pressure, as a means of speeding up the normal processes of nature. The matter being worked on is closed inside…” Ana gulped and started again. “Inside a hermetically sealed vessel. An alembic. It is heated on a furnace and, if the alchemist does it right, it passes through a defined series of stages to become gold or, alternatively, a tincture or ‘Philosopher’s Stone’ which, added to a substance such as mercury or lead, changes it into gold.

“This paradigm of heat-generating transformation is used by Change to effect the transformation of the human spirit as well. Their mantras—meditational chants—often concern the benefits of heat and pressure. Psychological pressures are positively welcomed, on individuals and on the community as a whole. Members are taught to welcome intrusive outsiders, hard physical labor, unpleasant tasks. When I was hurt at the museum the other day, it was a direct result of Steven’s instructions that two antagonistic boys be forced to spend the entire day in close proximity. When one of the boys, Jason Delgado, snapped and struck out—the other boy was insulting his sister. Dulcie. When Jason—” Ana stopped, her jaws clenched. In a minute she continued.
“When Jason lost control, Steven took him away for two days.”

“That was when you came to town with Dulcie. What do you mean, ‘took him away’?”

“I mean that early on the morning following the museum trip, Jason was removed from the room he shares with Dulcie. The men who led him off are two of Steven’s closest associates. And Dulcie was told that Jason was ‘helping Steven with his work.’”

“But he’s back now? Unharmed?”

“He was returned during the day while Dulcie and I were here. I’ve barely seen him since then, but he looked…” How far could she expect Glen to understand? “Jason looked changed. Exhausted. Depleted. Fulfilled. I’d say he had some fairly profound experience.

“Glen, you remember those drawings that Gillian sent me? There was one of a child’s nightmare, a man trapped—” She paused to swallow. “A man in what I took to be a giant pear or a raindrop, with two monsters outside. Glen, I think Change uses an alembic big enough for a man as part of their process of transformation. Steven called it ‘the power nexus of our Change.’ I think they shut people in there, an alchemical version of a sensory deprivation tank, as a means of applying pressure. I think the child’s drawing is a textbook illustration of the hallucinations a person experiences under enforced, long-term sensory deprivation. Probably not the child’s own experience, since the drawing was of a man with a beard, but possibly that of a father or friend who talked about it in the child’s hearing, and frightened him. I think… I believe that Steven shut Jason into the alembic that’s in the basement under the meditation hall, and I think there’s a good possibility that the Japanese boy died in one just like it.”

“Hell. Have you seen this thing?”

“Last night.”

“Where did you say it was?”

“In a locked room underneath the meditation hall. You enter it by a door off the highest meditation platform.”

“Damn it, Anne, what were you doing there?”

“I wanted to see if Steven had some kind of alchemical laboratory in the basement. That’s what I found, a complete alchemical workshop out of the Middle Ages. Plus a box of paraffin wax. There’s also a computer in there with a modem, in case any of your pet hackers want to play with it.”

“You didn’t open it up?”

“I didn’t touch it.”

“No sign of anything else in that lab?”

“No dismembered clocks or clippings of wire, no nice, labeled bins of Semtex, or even fuel oil and ammonium nitrate.” Those two harmless ingredients when combined had proven spectacularly deadly. “No heaps of pretty little balloons or scatterings of mysterious white powder, no distinctive smells other than the sulfur, and the lab equipment I saw couldn’t have been used to process any drug I know. Sorry—no bombs or drugs that I could see.”

Glen stood up and looked out over the rocky valley for a minute, thinking. Four days ago Ana had struck him as being far more healthy-looking than he had expected to find her, and he had been unable to get that unnatural cheerfulness out of his mind. It had not been like her, and this sudden venture into derring-do was not like her either. Besides which, the vulnerability and emotional involvement sounded more like Anne than Ana; it was all very worrying.

“I don’t like the sound of any of this, Anne,” he said abruptly. “I’m pulling you out.”

“My name is Ana, and it’s gone too far for that, Glen,” she said flatly. “The only way you can keep me
from going back to Change is if you get out your handcuffs.” She looked at him, and Rayne was amazed to see on her boss’s face a thing that on anyone else’s she would have called a blush. She dismissed the unlikely thought immediately.

Ana turned back to the landscape while Glen thought about this unexpected shift in authority. When he spoke again, it was in a voice gone dead with the realities of his profession. “Did you see any evidence that the boy Jason was locked into the thing against his will?”

“No.”

“Would he or anyone you can think of be willing to testify?”

“No,” said Ana. “No.” God, she felt like moaning aloud at the thought of that beautiful, strong boy stuffed into a dark, smooth space with the door shut behind him, and here was Glen thinking about warrants and rules of evidence. She dropped her face into her hands and scrubbed at her skin, which felt thick and insensate. “Jesus, you’re a cold son of a bitch. No, there’s no justification for a raid. You could argue that Jason is too young legally to have given his permission, but I’m sure you’d find he would refuse to testify. Nothing’s changed, except a boy in Japan is dead. I’ll go back to watching and listening, and if I need anything, I’ll develop problems with the tooth and make another appointment with the dentist.” She felt so tired, and old, and sick. “Go away, Glen. Christ, go away before I throw up on your foot.”

She tugged his coat away from her and held it out without raising her head. It was taken from her, and a hand rested briefly on her shoulder—Glen’s hand or Rayne’s, she could not tell—and then she was alone at the side of this sharp-edged concrete-and-glass building set down among the round red hills of Sedona. She leaned up against the side of the building, and in the darkness behind her eyelids she saw the dining hall mural,
which held it all: The progress from the prime matter of the desert on the left to fully actualized human on the right, and in the middle, looking like an elongated version of a Native American bread oven, the power nexus, the instrument of the proclaimed transformation, an alembic. What she had taken for a symbolic journey was physical and literal, an actual vessel in which sensitive human beings were subjected to the pressure of their own undiluted minds.