Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (9 page)

    
Jim
Bidwell cleared his throat. “The families—well, they’re a bit of a problem
right now. Most of them have left us. They stayed on even after two of the
boys—the ringleaders—were disfellowshipped a couple years back, but after the
killings, they turned around and blamed it on the church.”

    
“So
there’s a real history here,” said Raszer. “Why were they disfellowshipped?”

    
Amos
Leach answered. “Against the command of the elders,” he said, “they enlisted in
the Army and went off to fight in Iraq.”

    
Raszer
blinked. “And that was enough to get them booted out?”

    
“We’re
good citizens,” said Leach, “but we believe that there’s only one nation worth
fighting and dying for, and that is the Theocratic Nation of Christ, which was
established in 1914 to prepare our flock for the End Times.”

    
“The
world belongs to Satan, Mr. Raszer,” said Bidwell. “Just look around. Look at
any meeting of the UN General Assembly.”

    
Raszer
ignored the political contradictions. He had to stay on point or risk losing
them, and he was now far too intrigued to chance that. “And when the boys came
back from the war?”

    
“They
were worse than before,” said Leach. “That’s when the real trouble began.
That’s when they took that trailer up into the canyon and started luring the
other kids there. You see, we’ve got some protection from Satan’s power in our
communities. We learned a long time ago how to circle the wagons. But once you
venture out into the world, you’re at his disposal, and once you’ve been to
Babylon, you carry his disease.”

    
“It
wasn’t too long after they got back,” said Sam Brown, “that Ruthie—she’s Katy’s
older sister by a year--showed up. Her and the oldest boy, Johnny Horn, they’d
been sweethearts before Silas and Connie—that’s Silas’s wife—split up.”

    
“Okay,”
said Raszer, “I get it. I’m going to need the names and addresses of all four
boys’ families—the three who were killed and the witness—and the same for Katy
and Ruthie’s mother. I’m assuming you’ve got them.”

    
“We can
give you the Strunk family,” said Amos Leach. “And we’ll give you the last
known address for Silas’s wife. But the other families, no.”

    
“Then
I’ll have to get them from the police,” said Raszer. “That is, if you want me
to take this case.”

    
Leach
smiled, and Raszer felt sure he saw Leach’s eyes flash briefly. “I’m sure
you’ll manage to get what you need, Mr. Raszer. And Sam here will assist you in
every way.”

    
“Then we
have an agreement?” Raszer asked.

    
“We’ll
take it under consideration,” said Leach. “If you want my opinion, this is good
money after bad. Silas’s legacy could’ve been a new Hall. But let’s say we have
an

agreement on principal. We’d sure like to see Katy
redeemed.”

    
“I will
find her,” said Raszer, “if you want me to.” Now it was his turn to lace his
fingers in symmetry with Amos Leach’s. “But at the risk of laming my own horse,
let me address Mr. Leach’s opinion. Katy Endicott is now of legal age. I can’t
force her back. She could be anywhere in the world. That means time, and my
time isn’t cheap, even at a discount. Do you have the resources to see this
through?”

    
“Silas’s
estate passed to the church on his death,” Sam Brown replied, “and there is a
codicil to his will requiring that we use as much of it as necessary to find
and restore his daughter to the fold. Katy is one of our own. At the time of
her disappearance, she had more good years behind her than bad ones. She’s
still a member of the Little Flock. She belongs
with
us,” he said. “In the nation of Jehovah.”

    
Amos
Leach looked on, unblinking. “We’ll call you,” he said.

    
Raszer’s
tires were hubcap-deep in runoff by the time he left the Kingdom Hall. There
had been another downpour, only now abating. Even the hard rain, however, felt
gentler than the steeliness inside the church. Of all six men, only Sam Brown
had given off a scent he recognized as anything like his own.

    
And Amos
Leach—something wrong with that picture.

The call did come, late that afternoon. Despite
Sam Brown’s help with names, addresses, and some background, Raszer was a long
way from having what he needed to begin a proper investigation. He needed the
families’ help, and he would not live fully in the world of the case until he’d
seen through the eyes of the eyewitness, whose name was Emmett Parrish. Still
more essential was the perspective of perhaps the most important participant:
Ruthie Endicott. Finding her would take some legwork.

    
Each
case had its own landscape of mayhem, and that was where he needed to locate
himself, because until Raszer had fashioned a living narrative of the events
leading up to the night of the rave, his intuition would not boot up. At his
best, he was capable of thought pictures that neared the clarity of lucid
dreaming, or even so-called remote viewing. It wasn’t like the psychic radar of
those who could lay a missing girl’s angora sweater against their cheek and
conjure a sense of her whereabouts. It was both eerier and more methodical than
that. All stories had a fractal nature. They were made of the same tiles, only
the design of the mosaic had been changed. Every possible outcome was like a
different world; Raszer’s trick was to figure out which world this case
occupied.

    
He
wanted to get up into the mountains, to the site of Katy’s abduction, before
the rains closed San Gabriel Canyon Road. He couldn’t even begin serious work
until he’d stood at the crime scene, but before that, he needed to make a visit
to the Azusa Police Department and the detective who had handled the case.
Among other things, there was a set of snapshots he very much needed to see: those
taken on the morning after Katy Endicott’s crew had despoiled the Kingdom Hall.

“JOHNNY HORN,” said detective Jaime Aquino, laying
open a third file folder on his formerly pristine desk. “Also known as Johnny
Jihad . . . after he came back from the war, that is.” He looked up at Raszer,
more as a young father than as a cop, and stubbed his index finger into the
morgue photo of a young man of twenty-two: close-cropped blond hair, wide, sensuous
mouth, neck broken at the brainstem. “Some boys go to war and never get to know
the enemy. Never get close enough to smell him. They go back to their families,
their little towns, the farm or the coalmine—maybe have a few bad dreams, but
they shake it off. Johnny Horn came back
as
the enemy. From what we know, he came back sure that everything he’d ever been
taught was wrong.”

    
Raszer
lifted his eyes from the photo. “He had a bad ride over there?”

    
“I don’t
know about that,” said Aquino. “His unit was in Karbala, not Baghdad. He wasn’t
wounded. His military records don’t say much.”

    
“So, how
do you account for his change?”

    
“I think
it started before he left,” said Aquino. “Trouble in the family, some minor
run-ins. Then him and his buddy—this guy . . . ” The detective dropped his
finger onto a second morgue shot, one of a mannish boy with a yellow crest of
spiked hair, a lip ring, and a dagger tattooed on his left breast, with the
inscription “She Made Me Do It.”
“Henry
Lee is—
was
—his name. The two of them
enlisted, and the shit came down on them. Johnny was tossed out of his church,
tossed out by his family, and then he’s in fucking Iraq for two years. He had
nothing to come home to, but he came home anyway. Him and Henry. They shipped
out together, they came home together.”

    
“And
moved into the trailer,” Raszer said.

    
“Right.
Up above the Burro Canyon Shooting Park, on the east fork, not far from the
state corrections fire camp. It was an abandoned heap from the ’60s, wedged up
in a gulley. How it got up there, I couldn’t tell you. But Johnny took it over
and set himself up like some mystic commando. Stenciled a big peacock on the
side of it.”

    
“A
peacock?” Raszer asked.

    
“Right.
He had guns, he had pills, he had a pirate radio transmitter and a rebuilt
generator to power his music, and after a while, he had girls. The boys from
town, the slackers and gamers, some from other families the JWs had—what do
they call it?—
shunned
, they loved
Johnny. Made him a hero. They’d truck up there Saturday afternoon, do some
shooting at the range, and then play that hardcore techno shit all night, till
it shook the canyons. Drove the Forest Service and the other trailer folks
loco
. They finally confiscated his
generator. I guess that’s when the kids started looking for other places to
dance, if you can call it dancing.”

    
Aquino
did a wild-eyed impression of a raver’s pogo, as good as a man of thirty-two
could muster while seated, wearing a shirt and tie, and with pictures of his
young children on the wall. Raszer sensed that the detective, though square,
was probably not a bad dancer himself, given the right music.

    
“Why
didn’t they move him off the land?” Raszer asked. “I don’t get it—firearms,
drugs, a state prison facility nearby . . . ”

    
“Well,
unfortunately,” Aquino replied, “we didn’t know the whole story until after the
fact. Johnny and his friends fell through a crack. That’s federal land up
there, but it might as well be no-man’s-land. Technically, the Forest Service
could have instituted procedures, but it all happened pretty fast, and—believe
it or not—Johnny had the folks up there both spooked and sweet-talked. He was
smooth. And he had all the weapons cached. He learned that in Babylon. He
learned that from the enemy.”

    
“You say
he was a good talker, and you called him a ‘mystic commando.’ What was his rap?
What brought the boys up there, aside from pills and girls?”

    
“Well,
again, we got most of this from Emmett. That’s Emmett Parrish. He’s the boy who
got cold feet that night.”

    
“Right,”
said Raszer, glancing down at the names Sam Brown had given him. “The witness.
He was one of Johnny’s regulars, too?”

    
“Yeah.
According to Emmett, Johnny was into anarchy. He called his little club WARM,
for World Anarchist Reform Movement. Had that painted on the trailer, too. He
claimed he had ‘brothers’ in the Middle East and other places. Might’ve been
bullshit . . . he didn’t know which end he was coming from, and he didn’t care.
He had stuff up there about Aryan Nations, the Red Brigades, Hezbollah, and the
Freemasons, for chrissakes. All he knew was that everything was wrong, and that
all laws were made to enslave. When you added Henry Lee’s magical shit in with
it, it was quite a mix.”

    
Switches
began to click in Raszer’s mind. The first tiles in the mosaic fell into place.
“Tell me about Henry. What kind of magic was he into? Silas Endicott called it
Satanism. Was it?”

    
“Not
exactly, although what do I know? That’s your business, right?”

    
Raszer
cocked his head and waited for the other shoe to drop.

    
“You’re
the guy who worked that militia cult up in Shasta, right?” Aquino said.

    
“How did
you know that?” Raszer asked. “I was undercover, I didn’t appear in court, and
I wasn’t in the papers—not that time.”

    
“Cops
have their own Internet,” Aquino said, grinning. He picked up the telephone and
shook the cord, making it dance. “It’s called
la vina
.”

    
“Okay,”
said Raszer, holding up his palms in surrender. “Fair enough. But for the
moment, I’m just a PI looking for a missing girl, and I don’t know anything. So
what was Henry’s brew if it wasn’t the usual small-town, heavy-metal Satanism?”

    
“My
guess is, it was something else the boys brought back from Karbala,” said
Aquino, sliding open the top right drawer of his desk. “Along with this.”

    
He held
up a palm-size piece of black ore, dimpled with little pits. It might have been
basalt, or a small meteorite, but it looked a whole lot like Brigit’s moon
rock. A lot like the rock that had given Silas Endicott apoplexy and then
stopped his heart.

    
“May I
see that?” Raszer asked. It was heavier than he’d expected.

    
“We
found a few of these in the trailer, along with some weird little statues,”
said Aquino. “It’s technically evidence, but I, uh, kept one as a souvenir.
Sometimes, when I get bugged that we never solved this case, I take it out and
use it as a paperweight.” He shrugged. “Like it’s gonna talk to me, right?”
Detective Aquino’s chair creaked as he sat back heavily. “It’s just iron ore,
but of a type found across northern Iran and eastern Turkey. Possible meteoric
origin. I have no idea what it meant to Henry or where he got it from over
there. The kids who could tell us are either dead, missing, or out of state.”