Deviations (22 page)

“Your belief is that because she already had
enormous personal wealth she did not desire more?”

“And therefore it was your right to kill her?”

“I saw it more as a responsibility.”

“A responsibility?”

“Are you familiar with the phrase ‘All that is
necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing’?”

“And carving the 1488 on her chest?”

“That was to make clear the reason for her death.”

“Make clear to who?”

“First, to the police. Second, to the others who
were tempted to violate God’s will.”

I was thinking of Lakshmi Kumaraswamy, the new
professor at Central Montana that the pharmaceutical company had installed at
the university to carry on their research. There would be many others. “Do you
want to name names?”

“No,” he said. “I do not. When they are eliminated—a
process that will begin very soon—it will be impossible for the police to cover
up the motives for the murders. The story will be told. At that point, nobody
will have anything to do with the company. And then the company will abandon
its efforts to establish a facility here in Montana.”

“Is that why you killed Willson Fredericks? Was he
involved in spreading the reach of the company, or was it that he knew too much
about you and the Montana Patriot Front?”

I thought I saw a hint of confusion in his eyes.
“I’m tired of this. I’ve explained it to you in sufficient detail. If you don’t
understand what I have told you, it is because you are not sufficiently intelligent.”

* * * *

“Got the things?” Leonard
said to Ricky when he entered the room a couple minutes later.

Ricky nodded. He was holding two old shovels and a
length of rope.

Back in high school I’d read
In Cold Blood.
The
two murderers were hanged. I know the correct word is
hanged
, not
hung
,
because my teacher, Mr. Jessep, had corrected me. “Pictures are hung,” he had
said. “People are hanged.” This was when people were in fact hanged in a lot of
states out west, before the needle. Mr. Jessep was in his forties when I was in
his class more than twenty-five years ago. He’d be retired now, or dead. I
liked him. He wanted us to see how exciting and interesting all those books
were. He worked real hard at it, and even though most of us didn’t have the
brains or the patience for it, nobody made fun of him. He never tried to make us
feel stupid or inadequate, which we all felt anyway about almost everything.
Back then, none of us were sensitive enough to wonder about how he got where he
was, what had gone wrong. He was smart enough to go to graduate school and
maybe work in a university, where at least some of the kids wanted to learn
something. But there he was, year after year, trying to get us to read books
there was no way most of us would ever read. Everybody has a story, I guess.
The question is, does anyone want to take the time to listen to it?

I couldn’t remember whether it took a long time to
be hanged, and therefore whether it would hurt a lot. I decided I’d try to
throw my weight down to make it go faster.

“Okay, let’s do it.” Leonard got out of the chair,
reached inside his jacket and pulled a .45 out of his waist. He ejected the magazine
and looked at it, then slid it back in and put the pistol back in his pants.
This helped me clarify my options. I could try to run away—with my hands tied
behind me—and take a bullet in the back.

Leonard walked out the door, followed by me and
then Ricky. We went down a dark hall at the back of the church, then out an
exterior door. Down three steps. It was good to get out of that room, with its
dank air and the mattress that stank of BO.

We crossed the twenty yards to the chain-link
fence at the northern boundary of the compound. The one guard tower was off to
my left, the other to my right. I glanced at each one in turn. The guards were
on duty. They looked at us, curious but apparently unconcerned.

I looked over to the Reverend Barry’s house. I
didn’t see Nick Corelli’s rental that was there last night. All I saw was a
beat-up old Ford Ranger pickup, which I remembered from when I walked up to the
Rev’s house what seemed like years ago but was really just a little more than
twenty-four hours.

I tried to look in the windows at the side of the
house, but they had heavy curtains pulled shut. When we made it up toward the
gate in the fence, Ricky started fishing in his pocket for a key to the heavy padlock.
I turned around and was able to look in through the picture window in the
living room. The angle was pretty sharp, though, and all I could see was a
reflection from the woods to the north.

Not knowing if Leonard and Ricky were taking me
out to kill me on orders from Reverend Barry or if Leonard was a freelancer, I
thought it couldn’t hurt to shout out Reverend Barry’s name as loud as I could.
So I did, and Leonard spun around, pulled out his .45, and said “Shut up” at a
low volume but with plenty of dramatic emphasis. Then Ricky the wordsmith
jabbed me hard in the kidney with the handle of one of the shovels, sending me
sprawling to the ground.

I landed on my beat-up face. Almost immediately, I
could taste the warm blood trickling down onto my lips. I was wrong again—about
how it couldn’t hurt to shout out the Rev’s name. But I got the sense that
Leonard and Reverend Barry weren’t on the same page about what to do with me.
Which might turn out to be useful.

Chapter 21

I wanted to die brave. I
didn’t live all that brave, but if I could hang on for just a little while
longer, I could go out with a little pride and dignity. One thing I was certain
of: I wouldn’t ever say anything to Leonard or Ricky about them raping me. That
was the only way I could communicate to them—and myself, I guess—that it didn’t
happen. Or, to be more exact, that it happened but it didn’t mean anything. I
didn’t make it happen. I couldn’t have prevented it or stopped it. It was on
them. All on them.

It was too bad that nobody would ever see me die
brave. Leonard and Ricky would, but they didn’t count. And neither of them would
be able to understand it. Ricky wasn’t smart enough, and Leonard was living on
his own planet, one where bravery is defined as raping a woman and bashing her
skull in because you didn’t like her politics. No, nobody would know I died
brave. But I would, and that would have to be enough.

We walked out of the gate. I was glad I would die
outside the compound. Not that I had any positive associations with this
particular parcel of the great outdoors, but I’d officially survived my
imprisonment in the compound and I was headed back home.

As our six feet crunched through the pine needles,
the twigs, the fragments of leaves, and all the assorted crud on the forest
floor, I felt some satisfaction that I was still able to lift my legs and
stagger forward. I would soon become ashes and dust, but I was going to get
there under my own steam and on my own terms. I knew what the shovels were for,
and I was prepared to lie down and rest.

Off to the east I spotted my big rock, the one where
I’d spent part of last night. I saw the blue of my Mylar blanket and my camo backpack.
I didn’t know if Leonard and Ricky had grabbed my cell phone out of it before
they attacked me and brought me inside. It didn’t matter. My rapists would have
to be hit by two extremely well-placed lightning bolts before I could get over to
my rock and call for help. That is, if the phone was there.

I didn’t know how long we walked, Leonard in front
of me, Ricky behind. It could have been five minutes or an hour. I was beyond
pain, by which I mean that the pain was there, dialing in from all sectors, but
I didn’t notice it. I was thinking of other things. Mostly of my sister Kathy,
who I hadn’t seen in thirty years, since she ran away. She might still be
alive, although chances were bad. And of Mamma, who deserved to find peace. And
of my son. I wouldn’t get to see him get through the Shitty Years, maybe turn
into a man, maybe learn how to be happy. I thought, too, of my partner, Ryan,
who I’d never get to work with. I was crying, but I wasn’t really unhappy. I’d
have to say the word was melancholy. A lot of stories I wouldn’t see finished,
but it was all right. I didn’t need to see them finished, and it certainly
wasn’t necessary for me to be around for any of them to finish. The river would
carry me—and everyone else—wherever it would.

Leonard had stopped, but I wasn’t paying attention
and walked right into him. I fell down, landing on my hip and rolling onto my
stomach.

He turned around and gave me a nasty look, like I
was the daughter in the back seat who wouldn’t quit being a real pain in the
ass.

I was still crying, the snot flowing out of my
nose pretty good. I breathed in the rich earthy smell. The earth was damp, and
I turned my face back and forth to smear it with mud and the sweet-smelling
little green shoots sticking out of the rotting leaves. It was cold, and I
started laughing.

“How about that one?” Leonard said to Ricky. I
looked up and saw Leonard pointing to a pine tree about twenty yards ahead. It looked
a hundred years old, the trunk a good three feet across, and a couple of limbs more
than strong enough to handle my weight.

I was still laughing and crying at the same time.
“Oh, that’s a nice one, Daddy. Can you hang me on that one, Daddy? I’ll be such
a pretty ornament!”

Leonard looked down at me, my face covered with
dirt and leaves sticking to the snot and my scraped cheeks. He just shook his
head in disappointment. I looked back at Ricky, who had put down the shovels
and was tying a noose in the rope. His work was impressive. His fat fingers
moved fast, like this wasn’t his first noose. He finished the knot, then tugged
on it to test it.

“Right over there.” Leonard pointed to the limb.

As Ricky walked over to the tree and tossed the
noose over the limb, Leonard came around behind me and lifted me by my elbows.
I weigh one-twenty but I rose into the air like a toddler. He put his arm under
my armpit and led me over to the limb. He held me steady while Ricky put the
noose around my neck and tightened it.

“Now?” Ricky said.

“Yeah,” Leonard said, and I felt the coarse rope
bite into my neck. My heels rose off the earth, then my toes. The air stopped,
and I shut my eyes.

I was in the hospital, and the nurse was smiling
as she put Tommy in my arms. They’d cleaned him up and he smelled like powder,
but his face was red and he was screaming like he was the only one whose
routine was being disturbed. I felt his arms struggling against the towels, but
when I held him he began to relax, turning the screeching down a notch. I
looked up at Bruce, who was smiling and crying a little. I rocked Tommy in my
arms and he finally calmed all the way down. His eyes started to get heavy and
he fell asleep. Bruce reached over and hugged the two of us, and I drifted off
to sleep.

A growling mechanical sound came in on me from the
direction of the compound. I opened my eyes as the sound separated into two.
There was a low-pitched engine sound in stereo coming in from the southeast and
the southwest, and a higher-pitched sound from the south. I was still suspended
by the rope, my feet off the ground, and I couldn’t see too good. But I thought
I saw a dog, its nose to the ground, running toward me. Right behind it, a
small ATV.

“Keep going, Ricky,” Leonard said, and I felt
myself rising higher into the air. As I began to pass out, I heard the voice
say “Don’t stop.”

I heard the crack of rifle fire, two shots. I fell
to the ground, my windpipe suddenly open as I gasped for air. I lay on my side,
breathing in big gulps. I smelled a wet dog. I opened my eyes. The Reverend
Barry’s hound, Jasper, was all over my face, sniffing me up and down, dropping
drool on me, his tail swooshing back and forth.

The mechanical sounds had stopped. Through
Jasper’s legs I could see the Reverend Barry lumbering over toward me, then
veer off. I turned my head and saw him sink to the ground next to me. He was
cradling Ricky in his arms. He started weeping, wailing in despair as he
brushed Ricky’s hair back off his face.

I tried to sit up but fell over on my side. A few
yards away, Leonard was lying face down on the ground. The frame of his silver
glasses had cracked, one lens pointing up, the other out to the side.

I saw two big tan ATVs, identical, with big
automatic weapons mounted on the tail. Next to the ATV to the southeast stood a
man dressed completely in black from his boots to the balaclava that covered
his face. An automatic rifle was slung over his shoulder. He was talking into a
cell phone. From the other ATV another man came walking over to me. He was
dressed in the same black uniform but his face was uncovered. I recognized the
thick black beard with the red highlights.

He walked around behind me and cut the rope around
my wrists. “Can you stand up, Karen?”

I don’t know if I answered him, but he lifted me
up to my feet. I swayed a little, but my knees didn’t buckle. He loosened the
noose and removed it from my neck. He helped support me as we walked over to
his ATV.

A couple more tan ATVS came in from the east, each
carrying an agent in black, pulling up next to the bodies of Leonard and Fat
Ricky. Collapsing next to Nick Corelli in the seat of his ATV, I saw the other
agents lifting the two bodies and placing them on the metal shelves jutting out
over the engines.

As Nick started the engine, I saw Reverend Barry on
his knees, his hands over his face, his body convulsing in grief.

* * * *

“How’re you feeling?”

Groggy would be the answer. I was in a hospital
bed. There was an IV coming out of the back of my hand. I was on some kind of
pain killers and I don’t know what else. “Where am I?”

“You’re in the hospital in Rawlings,” Nick Corelli
said. “I want to fill you in and debrief you. You up for it or you want me to
come back later?”

“No, let’s do it now,” I said slowly. My mouth
felt like it was full of cotton, but my head was beginning to clear a little. To
my left and right, up near the head of the bed, were all sorts of machines
putting out beeping sounds, the green and orange lights on the black screens
confirming that in fact I was alive. I looked out through the glass wall, the
blinds mostly shut, and saw an officer on duty, his back to me. Couldn’t tell
who he was. Didn’t care.

“Okay,” Nick said. “You were out at Lake Hollow,
at the Montana Patriot Front compound. You remember that?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Two guys were stringing you up. We took them out.
Administered first aid to you at the scene, sedated you, and brought you back
to Rawlings.” He was sitting in a chair, speaking kind of slowly, so I could
follow it. “Took you in to the hospital, administered a rape kit, filled you
with antibiotics and other good stuff, and patched you up. That’s where we are
now.” I looked down at my hand with the IV. He was touching my fingers.

“You killed the two guys?”

“Yes. We announced ourselves, told them to stop.
They didn’t. Standard rules of engagement.”

I didn’t remember hearing them announce
themselves, but maybe I wasn’t paying full attention. “How did you know to come
look for me?”

“Reverend Barry—you know who I’m talking about?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Reverend Barry was concerned that he couldn’t
find Ricky. So he went over to the church building, saw that there was a door
open to one of the back rooms. He called me, then communicated with his guys in
the guard towers. They told him Ricky and another guy had taken you outside the
compound. Reverend Barry got his dog, the bloodhound, and went over the room
where they’d held you. The dog read Ricky’s scent. Reverend Barry got on his
ATV and followed the dog out to where you were. I called in my squad and came
in.”

“Who are you?” I said.

“Let me get one thing from you first.” I looked at
him, but his face was blank. “The guy Leonard Woolsey, did he confess to the
Dolores Weston murder?”

I nodded. “She was violating God’s will. And he
threatened others.”

“Give you any names?”

“No,” I said. “But I’d look at a biology
professor, name of Kumaraswamy. She’s sort of an employee of Henley
Pharmaceuticals. And check the members of the board at the company. I’d talk to
the legislators, too. If any of them were helping Weston, they might be in
danger, too.”

“Okay, that’s good.”

“Now, you gonna tell me who the hell you are?”

“Pretty much who you thought I was. FBI. My name
is Allan Friedman. I’m a special agent with the Domestic Terrorism Task Force.
Last ten years, I’ve been tracking what we call lone offenders.”

“That’s what Leonard was?”

“That’s right. That’s what we think, anyway. Typically,
these guys are associated with a militia group or a patriot group, then they
break away and start working solo or with a small group of guys. The most
famous one was Timothy McVeigh. You know, Oklahoma City.”

“Because the patriot group isn’t macho enough?”

“That’s usually it. The group is going too slow,
or isn’t violent enough, or something like that. Sometimes it’s just a power
struggle with the group leader.”

“And the Reverend Barry, he was too peace loving?”

“We’re not exactly sure. We pay particular
attention to the groups with older leaders. They’re most vulnerable to either a
takeover from more violent younger guys or to a lone offender who breaks away.
We’ll have to talk more with Reverend Barry.”

“So the patriot leaders have your cell number?”

“We stay in touch.”

“You don’t mind that?”

He smiled, and then the smile disappeared. “The
way we look at it, these groups are very adaptable. They always find a source
of food and shelter. We’re not going to be able to eradicate them. So we try to
work with them. It’s a symbiotic relationship. They tell us if they know about
a lone offender who’s gone off the reservation. We tell them if we know about
someone who’s targeting them. Guys like Reverend Barry, they understand how
this works. There’s a line they can’t cross. If they want to put racist flyers
under windshield wipers every few years, we explain to them why we don’t like
that. If they want to kill people, we try to prevent that kind of thing.”

“Why didn’t you tell me and Ryan you were going
offline?”

“Your mission and ours are a little different. Not
as different as you might think. But we’re a little more big-picture than you
are. The chief knew what I was doing, but everyone else was need-to-know.”

“And I wasn’t need-to-know?”

“No, you weren’t.”

“So why are you talking to me now?”

“I really shouldn’t be, but you enabled us to tamp
this thing down.” He paused. “And you … you paid a price.”

“You’re not afraid I’m gonna go to the newspapers
or anything?”

“When you have a chance to process everything
that’s happened, I think you’ll understand why that wouldn’t be helpful. You
might not agree with our methods, but I owed you an explanation,” he said. “I’m
willing to take a chance.”

“How are you gonna deal with Ricky and Leonard?”

“Haven’t decided yet on Ricky. Reverend Barry is
real upset that we killed him. The Reverend and his wife had taken the kid in
when he was real young. He had Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, and nobody would touch
him. But Barry and his wife did what they could with him. So we’re going to
have to think about that one.”