The Prophet (26 page)

Keisha Schuyler should have been the next Jackie Joyner-Kersee. Her face should have appeared on Wheaties boxes and Nike ads. She had been able to run the fifty-meter hurdles in 6.69 seconds, nearly beating the US record. And she was getting better and better. Although she had been born pigeon-toed to the point of it being a handicap, when she ran the crookedness of her body corrected itself. In fact, on the track was the only time anything felt natural to her.

A knee injury and a bout with prescription-drug and alcohol addiction had stolen all her hopes and dreams, leaving her an empty shell of a human being. Her continued addictions cost her another good career and landed her in rehab. But that was also where she had met Greg, her sponsor and future husband.

Now, with Greg’s help, her life was finally getting back on track.

Keisha checked the time. With a yawn, she said, “Come on, baby. It’s really late. We need to get to bed.”

Greg grumbled and said, “We’re on vacation, remember.”

“That’s right. And I don’t want to sleep the whole time. We need to be on the road by four at the latest.”

“Okay, you win,” Greg said as he shut off the movie.

They had both taken the next week off from work and were leaving the following afternoon after Keisha’s stepdaughter, Rhaelyn, came home from school. They were headed to Seattle. Keisha’s parents had moved there three years ago, and she had yet to see their new house. So they had decided to head out for a visit.

She stood up from the couch, her knee protesting at the movement. The pain was always worse during the winter. She smiled at her husband and gave him a little wink. He leaned in and kissed her. Greg was such a caring and handsome man with his large frame, dark black hair, and big brown eyes. And he could even cook.

Life had finally settled into a comfortable and secure rhythm. And for the first time in a long time, everything seemed to be going Keisha’s way.

The Prophet’s anger was a bright red. He could see the pulses of color radiating from his hands and arms as he gripped the steering wheel of the white Ford Taurus. He had just left the Schofield residence. It sat empty and in shambles. The family had been warned. Another betrayal at the hands of the former
Chosen
, but he would find them. With the Father on his side, he was invincible.

But while he worked out a way to track down Eleanor and the children, he also knew that he needed to acquire another of the slaves for use in the ritual. He needed five. One for each point of the pentagram.

Unlike Schofield, whose eccentricities when choosing the sacrifice had always been an annoyance but one that he had indulged, the Prophet didn’t care to know the ignorant piece of meat before abducting her. He didn’t feel the need for any type of dramatics beyond the ritual. No Circle A signatures scrawled on the walls. Just another meaningless slave to be sacrificed to the Father. Nothing more, nothing less. The dark ones would lead him to the next sacrifice, as it should have been all along.

He popped another piece of blotter paper treated with LSD into his mouth, to ensure that he could see the world as it truly was without the hindrance of the mortal coil. He sat there for a few moments. The snow falling all around him was lit from within like the small bioluminescent creatures living in the darkest parts of the ocean. The air was heavy as if it had become a liquid, and it smelled like rage. The suburban street swelled and contracted around him. It wasn’t that the houses had necessarily changed. It was more that they were alive, that they were breathing.

Then a section of the shadows coalesced into an oily amorphous figure. The figured moved away from him leaving tracer lines of black behind. The Prophet placed the Taurus into drive and then tried his best to keep the vehicle between the glowing and undulating lines on the road as he pursued the dark one down the street.

Keisha Schuyler padded across the dark burgundy carpet and flipped down the lock for the sliding glass door that led to the patio at the side of their home. Her hand stretched up beneath the dark brown curtain on the door’s left-hand side to flip off the patio light, but she froze in place. She hesitated for a second, and then she screamed.

There was a man approaching her back door. He was dressed all in black, and the look on his face told her all she needed to know. His eyes were wide and angry, and his face was haggard.

She stumbled back from the door and tripped over the cedar coffee table. The sound of her husband’s footfalls pounded down the stairs. “Greg!” she yelled. But the words had barely left her throat when the man in black grabbed a chair from their patio set and threw it through the glass. Shards exploded into the living room, and the chair twisted in the air and slammed into the cedar table near where she had fallen.

The man kicked out the remaining glass and stepped inside. Keisha back-pedaled on her hands and rear. Her bad knee shot pains down her leg, but the adrenaline overpowered the discomfort.

Greg ran through the archway into the living room. He held up a baseball bat, ready to swing on the intruder.

The man’s face showed no change, just the same wide-eyed stare. His eyes seemed distant. Then he raised his arm, and Keisha noticed the large revolver for the first time.

She opened her mouth to yell for Greg to run, but before she could utter the words the big pistol spat fire. Greg’s left leg flew out from beneath him, and he slammed down face-first onto the burgundy carpet.

The noise of the gunshot left her ears ringing even from several feet away. Everything felt so surreal, like something happening to someone else in a movie.

Greg’s screams echoed off the walls, and he tried to crawl away. But the man in black stepped casually over to him and fired again. Greg’s body jerked violently from the bullet’s massive impact, but then he lay perfectly still.

Keisha bolted for the stairs and her stepdaughter’s second-floor bedroom, but another blast into the wall in front of her made her stumble back from the steps.

“Don’t move. Get down on your knees.” The man’s slow Southern drawl surprised her. It was the type of voice she might have expected from a plantation owner living two hundred years ago. Not a country accent, but more that of a Southern aristocrat or professor.

“Please! Take whatever you—”

“Be quiet. I want you alive, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t put a hole in you. Maybe somewhere especially painful and debilitating. Like the kneecap. With a cannon like this, it’s liable to blow your leg clean off.”

The tears ran down Keisha’s cheeks, and she stifled a whimper as she fell to her knees. The man in black stepped forward and placed the barrel of the big gun against her forehead. It was still hot from his past three shots and burned her skin. But she dared not flinch. Her whole body trembled, and she closed her eyes, certain that her life was now over. Her only hope was that her stepdaughter had heard the noises and would find a hiding place rather than coming to help.

She heard a muffled thump in front of her and opened her eyes. A pair of handcuffs and a syringe rested on the carpet. “Inject that into your arm and then put on the handcuffs. Arms behind your back.”

“Please, I—”

The man cocked back the revolver’s hammer. It was a sharp sound that grated across her eardrum. “You have three seconds to decide whether you want that needle in your arm or a bullet in your brain.”

As she picked up and plunged the needle, she thought of her stepdaughter. She had complied more for the girl’s sake than her own. If Greg’s killer had Keisha, he wouldn’t need to search the rest of the house, and Rhaelyn might have a chance.

She locked the handcuffs around her wrists. The man in black pulled her up from the ground and shoved her past the dead body of the only man she had ever loved and toward the door.

After Ackerman’s call, Marcus had contacted Maggie and asked her to pick him up in the Yukon. They needed to take a little trip up north, and he wanted some time alone with her to talk about what had been going on between them. Then he had called Stan and relayed to him what Ackerman had learned from Crowley. They needed a possible location for the cult’s former compound and more information on the man called Conlan, who apparently went by the name of The Prophet.

He had also sent Andrew and Vasques over to investigate Crowley’s shop and see if the man could still be alive. The call had come back quickly that Crowley was dead. But he hadn’t been simply murdered, he had been nearly cut in half. Andrew had seemed extremely shaken by what he had seen, and that was saying something coming from a man who worked around the macabre on a daily basis. Marcus couldn’t help but feel responsible for Crowley’s death, but he couldn’t quite make himself feel sorry about it. Crowley had been found in a torture room of his own design, and they had also found tapes of the man abusing young boys. If anyone had deserved such an encounter with Ackerman, it was Vassago Crowley. And in some deep animal part of Marcus’s mind, he wished that he could have extracted the information himself.

Knowing that the compound was somewhere in Wisconsin’s Jefferson County, he had taken I-290 up to Route 53 and then across to Route 12. Along the way, they had passed through all manner of terrain, from suburban to rural to forest. They would be in Jefferson County within a couple of hours, just before sunrise. With luck, Stan would have a location for them by then.

Maggie had been silent for most of the drive, and Marcus couldn’t quite find the words to express his feelings. He drummed his fingers against the steering wheel and said the first thing that came to mind. “What’s the deal with you and this Rowland guy?”

“Why? Are you jealous?”

“We’re not teenagers, Maggie.”

“Only teenagers can be jealous?”

“I’m just saying that he doesn’t seem like a good fit for you.”

“You haven’t even met the guy.”

“I know the type. Rowland shouldn’t even call himself a satanist. People like that should just be honest and say that they’re selfish. How could you be interested in a guy who thinks that people should be their own god and only be concerned with their own desires and what makes them happy?”

She turned in the passenger seat to face him. The leather squeaked beneath her, and the movement stirred the scent of her perfume into the air. It was both sweet and fragrant, like orchids mixed with honey.

“Explain this to me,” Maggie said, “because I’m a bit confused. You’re not jealous because another guy asked me out: you’re simply worried about my soul.”

“Never mind. Forget I said anything.”

“I’m just trying to understand where you’re coming from.”

Marcus said nothing, and the silence stretched out.

After a few moments, she said, “Do you love me or not?”

The bluntness of the question shocked Marcus and made him hesitate. He wasn’t sure how to respond to something like that.

Apparently taking his silence as a negative, Maggie said, “I guess that’s my answer.”

“It’s not as simple as all that.”

“Yes, it is. Either you do or you don’t.”

“It doesn’t matter either way. You just don’t understand that. What did you think would happen? That we’d get married, have kids, and bring them along on cases? There was a time when all that I wanted was to be normal. Settle down with you and start a family. But I can’t do that, because I’m not normal. I’m just as broken as the men we hunt.”

“I can’t quit the Shepherd Organization, if that’s what you want,” she said.

“I don’t know what I want. But I know now that I can’t run from what I am.”

A long, cold silence accompanied them down Route 12 past houses and businesses and bare trees. They were all vague shapes at the dark edges of the headlights’ beam. The snowfall had tapered off as they drove, and the snowplows were out in force. They had already seen three of them along the way. But Marcus had heard that the worst of the storm was still on its way.

They drove in silence until they reached the northernmost edge of Jefferson County, but Stan still hadn’t called back with the information they needed. Marcus decided to fill up the Yukon, and if Stan hadn’t called by the time they pulled from the pump, he’d make a call of his own.

He pulled the Yukon up to the third pump of four at a small red and white Citgo station with a separate car wash in back. He hadn’t caught the name of the town, but the gas station appeared to be the hub of village commerce.

Stamping his feet and blowing on his hands to combat the chill in the air, he watched the numbers on the pump tick past the sixty-dollar mark. Then his phone rang.

“What did you find, Stan? We’re flying blind up here.”

“Okay, I’ve learned quite a bit about our new friend Conlan. Full name Anthony Mason Conlan.”

“Wait. His first name is Anthony?”

“Does that mean something to you?”

“Yeah, it does. It means that Vasques’s dad has been a step ahead of us this whole time. After he died, she found a note on his desk that referred to
Anthony C.
He must have been onto something.”

“If he knew about Conlan, then he definitely was. This dude is an A-number-1 nutball. When he was a boy, a doctor tried to diagnose him with a mild form of schizophrenia, but Conlan’s rich daddy wouldn’t hear of it. So the kid grows up and joins the military. He became a lieutenant in the army and volunteered for some experiments conducted in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was codenamed Project Kaleidoscope. They were dosing the grunts with LSD, synthetic marijuana, and two dozen other psychoactive drugs. All to develop chemical weapons that could incapacitate enemy soldiers. Very illegal.”

Marcus said, “Sounds a lot like the MK-ULTRA project the CIA had going.”

“Yeah, right along the same lines. But in 1981, a study was conducted that claimed the participants of the experiments suffered no long-term effects. Conlan wasn’t involved in the study because he had dropped off the grid by then.”

“There has to be more to it than that.”

“I’m getting there, boss. You gotta let me roll it all out for you nice and sweet. So, anyway, I dug deeper into the actual classified journals of the head researcher. A dude by the name of Dr. Ted Uhrig. And Dr. Teddy had a lot to say about our man Conlan. Apparently, during the experiments, the nutball freaked out and claimed to have been receiving messages from the devil himself. So fast forward a few years, and Conlan had started his first cult at his father’s plantation in Georgia. Then daddy kicks the bucket—under suspicious circumstances—and leaves a small fortune to his only son who has now started to go by the name of
The Prophet.
”

A man in a beat-up Chevy truck pulled up behind Marcus at the pump and honked his horn. Marcus replied with a form of sign language that he had learned at a young age back in Brooklyn. It involved liberal use of the middle finger.

“Where’s Conlan now?” he said into the phone.

“Completely off the grid. If he’s alive, then he must be using a false identity.”

“Okay, keep looking. What about the location of the compound?”

“I found several landowners named Bowman or Beaman in Jefferson County, but I cross-referenced topography and the time period. Came up with one old guy named Otis. Which sounds like a dog’s name to me, or maybe a cow’s, but I suppose it was probably more common back in the day. Anyway, you got lucky. The old man still lives there. I’m texting you the address and directions.”