Pathetic choice for a grown man to have. Work or an empty apartment. What the hell have you been doing all these years?
It was a good question. He only wished he had a good answer. What did any man do when he hadn’t found a woman he wanted to share his life with by the time he was eyeing forty as his next milestone? He worked. If he was lucky, he had a job that occupied most of his time and energy.
And if he was very lucky, that job meant something, counted for something in the sense of attempting to make the world a better place.
Or attempting to just make sense of it.
Not that he was having much luck at the moment.
The station was quiet, the second shift beginning to think about going home at midnight, desk conversation and radio chatter dealing mostly with that and plans for the following day. If he hadn’t known a woman’s body had been found in the river only that morning, he sure as hell wouldn’t have been able to tell it from the relaxed behavior of his officers.
Maybe they have lives.
No, he thought, it was something else. Something more. And it bugged him more than a little. They had always seemed to him curiously detached, most of them. He thought it was undoubtedly a characteristic of officers in any big-city police department, where getting too emotionally involved in stubborn homicide investigations could lead swiftly to burnout, but not so much in small towns where murder was still rare.
Or had been.
They should have been more agitated about these murders. Or at least, by God, interested in them.
“Coffee, Chief?”
He looked at the smiling and slightly quizzical face of Dale Brown and frowned. “You were on duty this morning. Why’re you still here, Dale?”
“Picked up an extra shift on account of Terry needing to visit his mom in the hospital up to Asheville. I don’t have much overtime in this month, and you said now was the time to get it if we wanted it, what with these bodies turning up in the river.”
Sawyer had indeed told his people that, but when he glanced past Dale toward his desk, all he saw was an open magazine.
Dale followed his gaze and said, “My turn to answer the phones, Chief. Only call that’s come in tonight was somebody complaining that a neighbor’s stereo was turned up too loud.”
Sawyer accepted a cup of coffee from his officer. “Check missing persons again. A hundred-mile radius. I need to know if there’s any chance that woman might not be from the Compound.”
“Sure thing, Chief.” He sounded almost cheerful.
Why doesn’t he have a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach?
But Sawyer couldn’t really criticize anyone for not being as visibly upset about the situation as he thought they should be, so he merely stopped by another desk for his messages and then went back to his office.
“Tom? What’re you doing here? And get the hell out of my chair.”
Dr. Tom Macy, the medical examiner for Unity County, took his feet off the desk and unfolded his tall length from Sawyer’s chair, yawning. “Almost asleep,” he confessed as he moved around the desk to the far less comfortable visitor’s chair.
“Is that why you weren’t at my crime scene first thing this morning? Pull a double shift at the hospital yesterday?”
He doesn’t have anybody to go home to either.
“I did. And it wasn’t a crime scene, we both know that. It wasn’t even a dump site, not as far as forensic evidence is concerned. Her body just happened to catch on that fallen tree.”
“You should have been there, Tom.”
“I got there as soon as I could. And I can’t tell you anything much anyway, same as before.”
“Nothing more than you told me this morning? That she could have died anything up to a week ago?”
“Yeah, about that.” Macy shrugged bony shoulders. He was tall, and thin enough to be familiar with cadaver jokes, especially given his position as county M.E. “Hard to know for sure. Nights have been cold and that mountain river is icy this time of year, so it probably slowed decomp—always assuming she was dumped in pretty soon after she was killed. Not many predators in and around that water as a rule, it moves too fast, but from what I saw, there were enough postmortem injuries that she could have been caught on fallen trees or half-submerged rocks a dozen times while the body worked its way downstream.”
“Downstream from the Compound?”
“You know I can’t tell you that. Not for sure. She could have been dumped in the river twenty miles away.”
“Or two miles away?”
Macy nodded. “Or two miles.”
“Which means she could have come from the Compound.”
“I can’t rule it out,” Tom Macy said.
Hunter threw a pebble against her window around ten-thirty, and Ruby slipped easily out of her bedroom window to join him outside. “It’s early,” she whispered. “My parents are still up.”
Up and arguing, even if it was so quietly she wasn’t supposed to know about it. Arguing about the church.
“They won’t be for long,” he whispered back. “Besides, I waited until they tucked you in.”
Ruby remembered with a pang the days of endless bedtime stories and of being sleepily aware that her mother always checked on her a final time before she and her father went to bed. The girl pushed those painful memories aside.
Things were different now.
Things had been different for a long time.
She followed Hunter as they slipped from her yard and across the next two backyards, heading for the accustomed meeting place at the barn over the hill in the west pasture. They kept well away from the church—and the cameras.
“I can’t stay out long,” Hunter whispered as they worked their way cautiously toward the barn. “My parents still do a bed check, but it’s never before eleven-thirty.”
“Why’re we meeting at all? It’s dangerous, Hunter.”
“Because Cody says Brooke’s going to make a run for it, and we have to talk her out of it.”
“Run for it? Where would she go? All the way to Texas by herself? She’s only twelve.”
“Yeah, that’s why we’ve got to talk her out of trying.”
Ruby didn’t speak again until they reached the barn and found their friends had already arrived. The barn had housed three ponies and half a dozen milk cows at one time; now it held only a few small pieces of farm machinery that wouldn’t be needed until spring.
It smelled mostly of machine oil and metal.
Not like a barn at all, Ruby decided. But her mind shied away from thinking about that, as it always did. And she simply said to Brooke, “Are you crazy?”
Her friend’s strained expression was obvious even in the dim light provided by Cody’s small Cub Scout lantern. “Ruby, you’re one of the Chosen too. And we’re not like the other girls—we know what’s happening. What it’s doing to us. Don’t tell me you aren’t scared.”
“We have shells.” Ruby was trying her best to pretend she wasn’t scared.
“And how long are those shells going to protect us? Sarah had a shell, and she’s gone. How many others have there been?”
“Brooke—”
“How many? People who just go away—or at least that’s what Father and the others tell us. And people who don’t go away, except that they do because they’re different. Because they change.”
“We won’t change.”
“How do you know?”
Before Ruby could respond, Cody spoke up for the first time. Gravely, he said, “I know Brooke can’t get all the way to Texas, not without help. But I know something else too. Whatever it is Father’s been waiting for, it’s nearly here.”
They looked at one another in the dim light, and none of them pretended to not be scared. Not even Ruby.
“She didn’t drown?” Sawyer asked his medical examiner.
“No. No water in the lungs. No sign of a gunshot wound, or a knife wound, or any blunt force trauma to the skin or muscle that wasn’t pos
tmortem.”
“And her bones?”
“Just like it was with Ellen Hodges.”
“But you can’t tell me how it happened.”
“Jesus, Sawyer, in my wildest imagination I can’t think of any way it could have happened. I mean, it should be an impossibility. How do you pulverize bones without damaging the skin and other tissue those bones are surrounded by? I don’t know. I don’t believe the chief medical examiner in Chapel Hill is going to know.”
“That’s not a whole hell of a lot of help, Tom.”
“Sorry.”
“I don’t suppose you were able to establish an I.D.?”
“On my end? No. There were no tattoos, no birthmarks, nothing especially distinctive. She was five-seven, probably slender, early thirties, brunette. My report’s there on your desk.”
Sawyer opened the folder and scanned the forms it contained. “You don’t have eye color noted.” He didn’t exactly ask, because he knew what the answer would be. Knew with a queasy certainty.
“Couldn’t tell what that was before she died. Right now her eyes are white.”
Sawyer drew a breath and let it out slowly. He put a hand to the nape of his neck, realizing only as he did so that he was trying to ease the crawling sensation of his body to something beyond his understanding.
He hadn’t wanted to be right.
“Like Ellen Hodges,” he said.
Macy nodded. “Another thing that beats the hell out of me, because there’s no medical explanation. No sign chemicals were used, no signs of trauma, just no color. Like the bones: Something that shouldn’t be, is.”
“You have any theories?”
“About the eyes? No. In all the years I’ve been in medicine, I’ve never seen anything like it. And I hope I never see it again.”
“Amen to that.” Sawyer leaned back in his chair, scowling. “I’ve managed to keep the . . . oddities of the deaths quiet, but I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to keep a lid on that. Once it gets out—”
“Once it gets out,” Macy interrupted, “most of the town will believe what you believe. That these deaths are connected to the church. Somehow.”
“Ellen Hodges was one of their members.”
“Yeah. Do we know the same about this woman?”
“According to them, nobody’s missing.”
“And you’re not buying it.”
“No. Not that it matters what I believe on that count—unless you can give me something, some bit of evidence, to tie that woman to the church.”
“Wish I could. Sorry.”
“Goddammit.”
Macy frowned. “Are you still getting pressure from Ellen’s family?”
Sawyer reached over and tapped a stack of messages to the left of his blotter. “Of this dozen messages, ten are from her father. Today.”
“But they aren’t coming to Grace?”
“Pretty sure I talked him out of that.”
“What about their granddaughter?”
With a shrug, Sawyer said, “I gather they buy the church’s story there. That Kenley Hodges took Wendy and left the church, the Compound—and Grace. For all I know, he’s been in touch with them; they’ve certainly stopped pushing for more searches of the Compound.”
“I’m a little surprised the judge granted you a warrant to search it in the first place.”
“Because he’s a church member? Probably why he signed the warrant. Didn’t want to be seen openly protecting the church or Samuel.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right.” Macy shrugged. “It also gave them the chance to publicly clear the good name of the church. You didn’t find Hodges or his daughter, didn’t find any evidence that Ellen was killed there, and everybody was extremely cooperative.”
“Oh, yeah,” Sawyer said. “They were just cooperative as hell. They always are.”
“You know, it’s just barely possible that they cooperate because they have nothing to hide.”
“You believe that if you want to, Tom.”
Almost apologetically, Macy said, “It’s just that I can’t think of a reason why. Why kill these women? What would Samuel or his church have to gain by it?”
“I don’t know,” Sawyer replied bluntly. “And that’s what’s driving me nuts. Because every instinct I have is telling me that all the answers are inside that Compound. I just don’t know where to look for them. And I’m not at all sure I’d recognize them if I found them.”
For Samuel, meditation after services was even more necessary than it was before services; as well as becoming centered and calm, he needed the time to focus his mind, to assess his condition. And, of course, God required of him this self-examination.
It was never easy, reliving those early years, but he did so, again and again, because God commanded him to.
Reliving the hell of abuse, experiencing the pain as though it were happening all over again. And, always, the blackout he could never penetrate, that lost time during which horrible things had happened. Horrible things he never wanted to believe himself responsible for.
But you are, God insisted. You know what you did. You know what happened. You know you punished them.
In my name. With my strength, you punished them.
You were my justice.
You were my sword.
He accepted that, because God told him it was so. But no matter how many times he tried, he could never remember just what precisely had happened.
His life entered a new and in many ways equally painful phase after he turned his back on that burning motel and walked away. He had to keep moving, for one thing; a child with no adult guardian within sight drew attention, and remaining too long in one place guaranteed that would become a problem. Likewise, he soon found that hitchhiking was risky and more than once escaped by the skin of his teeth from both predatory truck drivers and those good Samaritans who wondered why a little boy was all alone.
He would realize later that God had, clearly, watched over him during those early years, but at the time he saw nothing especially remarkable in his ability to take care of himself. He had taken care of himself for most of his life. If he had depended on his mother to feed and clothe him he would have gone hungry and worn rags more often than not.
He kept moving. He didn’t really have an ultimate destination other than Survival and remained in any one place only until his instincts—or some event—told him it was time to move on. The money that had seemed a fortune didn’t last very long, even though he was careful, but he was able to pick up a day’s work here or there by skillfully convincing this shopkeeper or that farmer that his mother was sick, the baby needed diapers, and his father had disappeared on them.
He developed a sure eye and ear for the more gullible or, some would say, more compassionate souls he encountered. And he managed to get what he needed, what was necessary for life—even if that life was hardscrabble and lonely.
He wandered. He managed, somehow, to mostly stay out of trouble so that the law was never interested in him. It was a matter of self-preservation; he knew records existed of petty thievery charges incurred while he was still with his mother, and despite the lack of convictions (because they’d always skipped town), he knew those charges would surface if he were to be picked up.
So he was careful. Very careful. Not that he never committed an illegal act, but he took pains to make sure to not get caught.
Samuel shifted uneasily in his chair, disturbed as always by the unpleasant memories. Because there had been times, when decent work was impossible to come by and thievery untenable, that he had resorted to using the only commodity he knew he could sell. His body.
Soul-shriveling, those times.
And maybe that was why he had so often paused during his wanderings at this or that church. Sometimes they offered a meal and a cot, but even if they didn’t, they were at least warm and dry inside. He would find a dim corner and settle there, sometimes dozing and sometimes listening if there was an especially passionate
preacher delivering an interesting sermon.
Somewhere along the way, he was given a Bible, and though his first inclination was to sell it, he tucked it inside the increasingly worn duffel bag instead. He had taught himself to read, and eventually he began to read the Bible.
There was a lot he thought was good.
There was a lot he didn’t understand.
But, somehow, it spoke to him, that book. He read it and reread it. He spent hours and hours thinking about it. And he began to spend more time in churches of all denominations, listening to sermons. Watching how the congregation did—or did not—respond. Making mental note of what obviously worked and what failed to move people.
Within a few years, he was preaching himself, in small churches and on street corners and in bus stations.
He found God.
Or, more accurately, God found him. On a scorching hot July day when he was thirteen years old, God reached down and touched him.
And his whole life changed.
He was very good at eluding electronic security. Any kind of security, really, but especially the electronic kind. He called it his own personal stealth technology, and as far as he knew it was unique to him.
Part of what made him special.
Getting past the fence and into the Compound would be easy. They did not, after all, want to look like they were an armed camp bristling with weaponry or technology. They did not want to appear threatening or even especially unwelcoming. The surface had to be peaceful and calm.
Simple folk, that’s what they were supposed to be.
What most of them were, probably.
At any rate, they didn’t electrify the pretty wrought-iron and brick fence, they merely set up an electronic detection zone just inside it, so they knew who was coming into the Compound. Usually.
He made certain he was far enough away from the gatehouse that no guard with infrared binoculars might be able to pick up what the security cameras would never see, but otherwise he didn’t worry about being detected. It was late, and he was reasonably sure that most of them were tucked safe and sound in their beds.
It helped that there were no longer any dogs acting as alert and faithful guards in the night. He wondered if they had thought of that. If they might have regretted that. If they had even guessed it might happen.