“Look,” I finally said as the headlights flashed out, “I wasn’t whacking off, okay. I was just ... admiring ...”
“Not now, Disciple.”
“I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t want to ...” I added as I strode to the door in anticipation of Nolen’s knock. I pulled the chain—the church picnic had left my nerves a little peckish.
“I’m supposed to be flattered, huh.”
“You make me fat, baby. What can I say? Hi, Caleb.”
Policemen typically look intimidating when they darken your door, but Nolen had too much of a Barney Fife aura. He was drawn, taut in voice and manner. “Um, would you mind coming with me to the station?”
He looked like a kid, standing as he did, awkward in the irregular parking lot light, a high school senior suddenly tapped to play lead man in his community’s first bona fide disaster. He had that overmatched mien, face and eyes disconnected lest the fear shine through. Like Bush on the day after 9/11, before prayer fooled him into thinking he was equal to the trap fate had set for him.
“The finger belonged ...” he began, “or, ah ... belongs to Jennifer. And now with the toe ...” He grabbed the back of his neck, blinked skyward. “... we’re almost certainly dealing with a homicide ...” he said, letting his voice trail away.
Homicide! his eyes repeated.
I understood—or thought I understood—what he was driving at. “It’s okay, Caleb. I’ll call the Bonjours first thing in the morning.” The guy had enough on his plate as it was. Besides, I had given too many people too much bad news in my life. Practice makes perfect.
And as any private dick will tell you, it pays to collect markers from The Authorities.
Caleb’s relief was obvious and immediate. “Thanks, Disciple ... I would really appreciate that. I mean, I know I’ll have to talk to them ... eventually. B-but I’m, ah ...” His voice pinched about a sob. Apparently he had bigger terrors on his list. “I’m, ah, not so good at, ah, you know, failure ...”
Why was I the only person who had assumed she was dead all along?
Nolen raised thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose. “It’s, ah ... It’s, ah ...”
He was crying—crying!
Fawk. Me.
I blame it on Hollywood. Christ, I blame it on our whole fucking Just-believe-in-yourself culture. The problem wasn’t that Caleb Nolen possessed the sensitivities of an interpretative dancer; the problem was that he had been fooled into thinking he could be anything he wanted,, if only he were to try-try-try. He had been an imaginative little boy, I’m sure, one captivated by blazing images of justice and domination, when he should have been practising how to stand on his tippytoes.
“Just, the stress, ya know?” he exhaled. He tried to smile, grimaced instead.
“Go slow, Caleb,” I said with a reassuring smile. Iraq—the old one, fought for the old Bush—had taught me how to fake crisis-compassion. “Remember, the freak show is just getting started. Everything works better if you tune out the noise and take things one step at a time.”
“One step at a time,” he repeated, breathing as though preparing for a dive. He did his best to avoid Molly’s gaze, which condemned all the more because of its obvious pity.
He swallowed, nodded to himself as if remembering some original purpose. “Sorry, Disciple. Stupid, huh? A chief of police who loses it over a baby toe!” He flinched from this line of observation, realizing that it was making things worse. What was important was that he pretend ... That was the human answer.
He copped an artificially relaxed pose, hand on hip, something an underwear model might practise in a mirror. “Um, hey, Disciple? Have you ever worked a case ... I mean, I was wondering, if you had ever worked a case involving, ah ... you know”—a quick swallow—”ritualistic murder.”
That was how Molly and I found ourselves in the back of Nolen’s cruiser, whisking beneath a long necklace of street lights. Nothing was said for a minute or two. Molly and I just sat stewing in our embarrassment for Nolen. I could almost feel him grinding his teeth in shame.
I was actually relieved when my cell riffed for the second time that night.
“Hi, Disciple. Albert. “ I could tell from his tone that he was embarrassed about his previous call on Thursday night. “I know it’s late, but I thought I shoud take a chance anyway—leave you a message at least. Did I catch you at a bad time? “
“Kind of. Hospital emergency room, actually.”
“Oh ... Is everything okay?”
“Don’t have much time, Albert. I think I see the proctologist waving to me now.” Molly punched me in the arm for saying that.
“The Church of the Third Resurrection ...” he said with an air of hesitation. “I actually came across them researching my last book. They’re what’s called a Christian Identity sect:. “
I knew a thing or two about identity politics and several things more about evangelical Christianity, enough to know that any love child of theirs was bound to be a homely bastard.
“Lemme guess. White supremacists, right?”
An appreciative pause. “You do know why it’s calledthe thirdresurrection, don’t you? “
It was a good question—one ofthose obvious things I keep overlooking. “I don’t know, Albert. They all seem to have some kooky name. I just assumed they used it to differentiate their racist brand, you know. It’s a crowded market out there.”
“Well, they call it the third resurrection because they think the Second Coming’s already happened... “
“You mean Jesus has already come back?”
“Oh yeah. Only this time around he went by the name Adolf Hitler ...”
Ever get that wet-your-mental-pants feeling? I always knew I was swimming in the deep end—that I was investigating a murder—but this was where I realized I had forgotten my water wings.
“You gotta be kidding.”
“Shit you not. Just watch yourself, okay? These people may seem silly, but they have their fair share of dedicated fanatics. From what I can tell, they spend most oftheir time whacking each other, but...”
I just love the way civilians throw words like whacking around. Fucking HBO, man.
“Life just wouldn’t be the same without me, huh, Albert?”
“Don’t underestimate them, Disciple. There’s a good reason we can’t stamp this lunacy out. Just look at the nearest school playground. We’re born little fascists.”
I’ve always thought that kids are overrated—even as a kid. Can’t hold their liquor worth shit.
“Hitler as Jesus, huh?”
“I told you, man. Nothing’s quite so cheap as belief.”
Sometimes insights hit you so hard, so fully and completely, that your IQ drops through the bottom of your boots. How could I be such an idiot?
“And let me guess,” I said, my scalp prickling. “Their cardinal sin is ...”
Albert said all he needed to say. “Miscegenation. “
People get all fucked up about purity. I dated this chick, Brenda Okposo, who was a social psychology professor teaching religion at New York University. Bitter and beautiful—my kind of girl. A “sessional,” she called herself, which led me to crack innumerable jokes about our “sessions” together. Anyway, she said that humans have specialized regions of the brain dedicated to avoiding contaminants. Apparently even before we knew about germs, we had evolved instinctive aversions that helped us avoid them. Then along comes culture, and the ability to train children to attach aversions to this or that, so that we can be utterly revolted, out- and-out nauseated, by pretty much anything.
We get all fucked up about purity.
The ironic thing was that it was a small disagreement about condoms that festered into the blowout that ended—or “Brended” as I joked to my buddies at the time—my relationship with Dr. Okposo. She got it in her head that condoms were simply another expression of our culture’s pathological addiction to purity. So, of course, the best way to slip this obsessive noose was to subm
it to a battery of clinicians and blood tests and throw the rubbers out the window. I was busted at the time, flat- fucking-broke, and too proud to take her up on her offer to pay.
The last words I heard were literally, “I can’t believe you’re choosing cock balloons over me!”
That was October 3, 2002—what should have been a bad day, but was just too weird to be anything ... really.
“Caleb,” I said, leaning forward to talk through the slot in the safety glass. I fixed his eyes in the rear-view mirror. “I just have a couple questions.” He was enough of a nervous Nellie that I could tell he knew what I was about to ask him. He had caught my conversation with Albert—or as much as he needed, anyway.
“Shoot.”
“Why didn’t you say anything about the Church of the Third Resurrection?”
When he failed to answer, I glanced at Molly, saw the twinge of sudden apprehension.
“Yeah ... “ he finally said, his eyes bouncing back and forth from the street in the windshield to me in the mirror. “What about them?”
Evasion. Plain and simple. This was when it dawned on me that Molly and I were pretty much trapped in the back of his cruiser ...
I blinked and saw him sitting behind his desk—our first meeting. “I know how it sounds. But you live here long enough and you begin to take a dim view of things, you know? There was just something about her that made you think she was, well in danger. Like she was an endangered species or something. “
You would think double takes would be part and parcel of a career like mine, but the fact is, they’re not. I mean, I didn’t simply get into the business because I was tough, charming, and didn’t need to take notes. Thanks to all the retards in Hollywood, I also thought private investigating would be filled with surprises. Wrong. Like I said, people repeat, even when they’re busy fucking each other over.
I had been had. Despite all the goofy precautions I take, all the little anti-social gimmicks I use to remind myself there’s always more than meets the eye, I had willingly jumped into the jaws of what could be a lethal trap. People take things at face value, especially when those things gratify the old ego. So when a cop calls you at 11:38 EM. to say that he needs your help with the latest twist in your case, what do you do? Apparently you leap to your feet like the stooge you are, shout, “Hurry, Watson!” and jump into the back of his police cruiser.
Motherfucker.
“That wasn’t my question, Caleb. I asked you why you never said anything about them?”
But the fact was, he had, only in ways that had made me think he was soft in the head. Shit. Shit. Shit.
I had purposefully antagonized Reverend Nill in the hope of goading him into action. And then, true to form, I had let the prospect of getting laid derail everything. As bad as James fucking Bond, only minus all the class. I mean, with all those references that Nolen had made to bigotry in our first talk ... All I had to do was rehearse that conversation and all the obvious questions would have asked themselves. And now here I was, trapped in the back seat of Nolan’s cruiser, with every reason to believe that the turd actually belonged to the Church of the Third Resurrection.
Why else would he have worked so hard to put verbal distance between himself and bigotry that first meeting?
“I don’t understand,” Nolen replied with an oh so phony smile. He braked at one of Ruddick’s few stop lights. I could see Molly covertly trying her door. Locked, of course.
“Well, Caleb, let me put it this way, then. You have this beautiful white girl, named Jennifer, who likes going out dancing with her best friend, who happens to be a handsome black man, at a bar that happens to be frequented by several fanatic members of a white supremacist religion, which is not only run by a cadre of ex-cons but also happens to be actively recruiting in your jurisdiction, and then suddenly, poof, this beautiful white girl disappears, vanishes ... “
While I was saying this, I pulled my cell out of my belt clip and handed it to Molly, who snapped it up like a fat kid with chicken nuggets. Caleb didn’t reply at first, so the sound of Molly leaving a “detailed message” for her editor at the Post-Gazette seemed to grate with sham intent ...
“Yeah,” she was saying, “so I’m, like, with Chief Nolen right now, Chief Caleb Nolen, and we’re heading to the station ...”
I glared into the rear-view mirror with violent intensity, watched Nolen’s face from the angle of out-of-body experiences and guardian angels. His eyes clicked to meet mine once—twice ...
“I have a daughter,” he fairly blurted. “Cynthia. She’s seven, more beautiful than ... I don’t know. About eight months ago I get this call, an anonymous prowler tip ... over on Ross and Maitland. Turned out to be nothing ... except that I was almost forty-five minutes late picking Cynthi up from her swimming classes. When I finally arrived at the school, I find out that someone’s already driven her home ... her coach’s assistant, a woman who just happens to belong to Nill’s church ... “
His eyes flash up to the mirror, and for the first time I glimpsed real fury. “Thirds,” he says, staring at me for a heartbeat. “We call them Thirds ... “
His gaze bored on down the road.
“They own this town.”
He pulled up in front of the white-glowing station, dropped the cruiser in park. A call crackled across his radio—some small-town nonsense that he completely ignored. My hackles had smoothed somewhat, but I wouldn’t breathe easy until he cracked the fucking back doors. He had fairly admitted that Nill had leverage, that he was frightened for his family. Maybe that explained his emotional outburst at the motel.
Nolen turned in his seat, continued explaining in a more apologetic tone. After the incident with his daughter he had researched Nill, discovered that he was in fact an ordained minister. Nolen had toyed with the thought of discrediting him before his congregation. But he was a former convict as well, one with connections that ran deep into the Aryan Brotherhood and the Hells Angels. This was why the man leapt to the top of his list when Jennifer went missing.
“I went and talked to him,” Nolen said in defensive tones. “To Nill. He was pious ... furious ... Said that there’s no one in his church who would dare cross his word. And his word was to keep everything quiet, to express nothing but Christian charity, to do everything they could to see the Thirds grow ... “
He turned his face to the white gleam of his station, hesitant and brooding.
“Maybe I was afraid. Hell, I know that I was afraid ... And why shouldn’t I be, when both you and I know I’m just a grocery clerk playing cops and robbers.” Even without seeing his expression, I knew that this admission cut him deep.
The upholstery creaked. He turned his face back, glanced at Molly then at me through the slot. “But I believed him, Disciple. I just thought ... I just hoped that I could have it, like, both ways, you know? So I believed the lunatic.”
And for my part, I believed Nolen. Well, to be more precise, I believed that he believed what he was saying—which is about as good as it gets with someone like me.
I mulled his words for a moment, thought about how Baars had avoided my question of whether they had any enemies in Ruddick. “And what about the Framers?” I asked. “They would know about the Thirds, wouldn’t they?”
“You would think so,” Nolen said. He stared down into his palms, frowned as if seeing a stain he thought he’d washed away. “But the town they live in is five billion years away.”
The Ruddick police force was about the size you would expect for a town of around four thousand souls: a chief, a deputy chief, two sergeants, and about twelve PFCs. But since Ruddick had once been a small manufacturing hub of some twenty thousand, the police station was almost ludicrously oversized—it was like Nolen and his people had set up shop in the corner of an abandoned warehouse.
Nolen waved us past his unblinking duty sergeant and ushered us into a conference room adjacent to his office. I had popped the cork on my memory and was reciting details of every similar ritualis
tic murder I had seen on A&E, Discovery Channel, and so on. The truth was, I had never worked a case remotely like this one before. Murders like this, ones involving intentional as opposed to inadvertent clues, are a bona fide rarity. The vast majority are either simple crimes of passion or involve money and property. If anything, murderers are even more allergic to symbolic abstractions than the general population. There’s nothing quite so literal as blood.
It really is a miracle when you think about it: that there could be so many brains—billions of them buzzing out there—and that so few of them would suffer this kind of glitch. Thank God for natural selection, I say.
It was Molly who asked Nolen if he could pinpoint the locations of the two fingers and the baby toe on a map. He left the two of us blinking in the fluorescent glare for several moments, then returned to spread a large map of Ruddick across the veneer-topped boardroom table.
“So ...” Nolen said, scratching his head with a pencil while he found his bearings. It took him several moments peering at street names, but soon he had marked the map with three little-girl-neat Xs. Dancer, I thought. The guy was a dancer.
I tried to make a show of being hard-boiled and wise, but all I could really think about was how gay Nolen’s Xs looked. He should be politicking behind the scenes on the latest Britney Spears tour, not policing.
“What if ...” Molly began.
I knew her well enough by now to take her thoughtful tones seriously. “What if what?”
“Nothing.”
“Spit it out.”
“It’s just so ... cheesy,” she said.
“Nothing original about murder, Molls.”
“Well,” she said, leaning over the map, “what if the fingers have been arranged, you know, in order...” Nolen answered her questioning hand with his pencil. “So that if you draw a line ...”—she connected the two Xs marking the locations of Dead Jennifer’s index and bird fingers— “between these locations ... and extended it ...”
I laughed. She was right, it was cheesy, but then so was the bulk of the American public. Hell, even I had a weakness for skulls and eagles. Odds were the killer was cheesy as well.