‘He was at my house when they tried to kill me.’
‘You say, but you were woozy. You told me yourself you couldn’t see straight.’
‘Rachel saw him.’
‘Yes, she did, but she’d just been hit on the head and had blood in her eyes. She herself admits that she can’t remember a lot of what was said, and he wasn’t there for what followed.’
‘There’s a hole in the ground at Eagle Lake where seventeen bodies were found, the remains of his flock.’
‘He says fighting broke out between the families. They turned on each other, then on his own family. They killed his wife. His children responded in kind. He claims he was over in Presque Isle on the day they were killed.’
‘He assaulted Angel.’
‘Faulkner denies it, says his kids did it and forced him to watch. Anyway, your friend says he won’t testify and even if we subpoena him any lawyer worth more than a dollar an hour would tear him apart. A credible witness he is not. And, with respect, you’re hardly an ideal witness either.’
‘Why would that be?’
‘You’ve been pretty free with that cannon of yours, but just because charges have been let slide doesn’t mean that they’ve disappeared off everybody’s radar. You can be damn sure that Faulkner’s legal team knows all about you. They’ll push the angle that you came tearing in there, shooting the place up, and the old man was lucky to escape with his life.’
I pushed my coffee cup away. ‘Is that why you brought me here, to rip my story to shreds?’
‘Do it here, do it in court, makes no difference. We’re in trouble. And maybe we have other worries.’
I waited.
‘His lawyers have confirmed that they’re going to petition for a Supreme Court review of the bail decision within the next ten days. We think that the available judge may be Wilton Cooper, and that’s not good news.’
Wilton Cooper was only a few months shy of retirement, but he would continue to be a thorn in the side of the AG’s office until then. He was obstinate, unpredictable, and had a personal animosity toward the AG, the source of which was lost in the mists of time. He had also spoken out in the past against preventive bail and was quite capable of defending the rights of the accused at the cost of the rights of society in general.
‘If Cooper takes the review, it could go either way,’ said Ornstead. ‘Faulkner’s claims are bullshit, but we need time to amass the evidence to undermine them and it could be years before a trial. And you’ve seen his cell: we could keep him at the bottom of a volcano and it would still be cold. His lawyers have got independent experts who will claim that Faulkner’s continued incarceration is endangering his health, and that he will die if he remains in custody. If we move him to Augusta we could shoot ourselves in the foot in the event of an insanity plea. We don’t have the facilities for him at the supermax, and where do we put him if we move him out of Thomaston? County? I don’t think so. So what we have right now is an upcoming trial with no reliable witnesses, insufficient evidence to make the case watertight, and a defendant who may be dead before we can even get him on the stand. Cooper would just be the icing on the cake.’
I found that I was clutching the handle of my coffee cup so tightly that it had left a mark on the palm of my hand. I released my grip and watched the blood flow back into the white areas. ‘If he’s bailed, he’ll flee,’ I said. ‘He won’t wait around for a trial.’
‘We don’t know that.’
‘Yes, we do.’
We were both hunched over the table, and we both seemed to realize it simultaneously. Over near the window, the two old men had turned to watch us, their attention attracted by the tension between us. I leaned back, then looked at them. They returned to watching the traffic.
‘Anyway,’ said Ornstead, ‘even Cooper won’t set a bail below seven figures and we don’t believe that Faulkner has access to that level of funds.’
All of the Fellowship’s assets had been frozen and the AG’s office was trying to follow the paper trail that might lead to other accounts undiscovered so far. But somebody was paying Faulkner’s lawyers, and a defense fund had been opened into which dispiriting numbers of right-wing crazies and religious nuts were pouring money.
‘Do we know who’s organizing the defense fund?’ I asked. Officially, the fund was the responsibility of a firm of lawyers, Muren & Associates, in Savannah, Georgia, but it was a pretty low-rent operation. There had to be more to it than a bunch of Southern shysters working out of an office with plastic chairs. Faulkner’s own legal team, led by Grim Jim Grimes, was separate from it. Stone features apart, Jim Grimes was one of the best lawyers in New England. He could talk his way out of cancer, and he didn’t come cheap.
Ornstead blew out a large breath. It smelled of coffee and nicotine.
‘That’s the rest of the bad news. Muren had a visitor a couple of days back, a guy by the name of Edward Carlyle. Phone records show that the two of them have been in daily contact since this thing started, and Carlyle is a co-signatory on the fund checking account.’
I shrugged. ‘Name doesn’t ring a bell.’
Ornstead tapped his fingers lightly on the table in a delicate cadence.
‘Edward Carlyle is Roger Bowen’s right-hand man. And Roger Bowen is—’
‘A creep,’ I finished. ‘And a racist.’
‘And a neo-Nazi,’ added Ornstead. ‘Yup, clock stopped sometime around nineteen thirty-nine for Bowen. He’s quite a guy. Probably has shares in gas ovens in the hope that things might pick up again on the old “final solution” front. As far as we can tell, Bowen is the one behind the defense fund. He’s been keeping a low profile these last few years but something has drawn him out from under his rock. He’s making speeches, appearing at rallies, passing around the collection plate. Seems to me like he wants Faulkner back on the streets pretty bad.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, that’s what we’re trying to find out.’
‘Bowen’s base is in South Carolina, isn’t it?’
‘He moves between South Carolina and Georgia, but spends most of his time somewhere up by the Chattooga river. Why, you planning on visiting down there?’
‘Maybe.’
‘I ask why?’
‘A friend in need.’
‘The worst kind. Well, while you’re down there you could always ask Bowen why Faulkner is so important to him, though I wouldn’t recommend it. I don’t imagine you’re top of his wish list of friends he hasn’t met yet.’
‘I’m not top of anybody’s wish list.’
Ornstead stood and patted me on the shoulder.
‘You’re breaking my heart.’
I walked with him to the door. His car was parked right outside.
‘You heard everything, right?’ I asked. I assumed that Stan had been listening in to all that had passed between Faulkner and me.
‘Yeah. We talking about the guard?’
‘Anson.’
‘Doesn’t concern me. You?’
‘She’s underage. I don’t believe that Anson is going to be an influence for the better in her life.’
‘No, I guess not. We can get someone to look into it.’
‘I’d appreciate it.’
‘Done. Now I got a question for you. What happened in there? Sounded like there was a scuffle.’
Despite the coffee, I could still taste the mouthwash.
‘Faulkner spit in my mouth.’
‘Shit. You going to need a test?’
‘I doubt it, but I feel like swallowing battery acid to burn it out of my mouth and insides.’
‘Why’d he do it? To get you pissed at him?’
I shook my head.
‘No, he told me it was a gift, to help me see more clearly.’
‘See what?’
I didn’t answer, but I knew.
He wanted me to see what was waiting for him, and what was coming for me.
He wanted me to see his kind.
6
But at the head of each group is a cadre of lifelong activists, and even as the names of their movements change, even as they fight amongst themselves and shatter into smaller and smaller splinters, those leaders remain. They are missionaries, zealots, proselytizers for the cause, spreading the gospel of intolerance at state fairs, rallies, and conferences, through newsletters and pamphlets and late night radio shows.
Of these men, Roger Bowen was one of the longest serving, and also one of the most dangerous. Born to a Baptist family in Gaffney, South Carolina, by the foothills of the Blue Ridge, he had passed through the ranks of any number of far-right organizations, including some of the most notorious neo-Nazi groups of the past twenty years. In 1983, at the age of twenty-four, Bowen had been one of three young men questioned without charge about their involvement in the Order, the secret society formed by the racist Robert Matthews and linked to Aryan Nations. During 1983 and 1984 the Order carried out a series of armored car and bank robberies to fund its operations, which included assorted arson attacks, bombings, and counterfeiting efforts. The Order was also responsible for the murders of the Denver talk show host Alan Berg and a man named Walter West, a member of the Order who was suspected of betraying its secrets. Eventually, all members of the Order were apprehended, with the exception of Matthews himself, who was killed during a shoot-out with FBI agents in 1984. Since there was no evidence to link Bowen to its activities he escaped prosecution, and the truth about the extent of Bowen’s involvement in the Order died with Matthews. Despite its comparatively small force of activists, the FBI’s operations against the Order had consumed one quarter of the bureau’s total manpower resources. The Order’s size had worked in its favor, making it difficult to infiltrate by outsiders and informers, the unfortunate Walter West excepted. It was a lesson that Bowen never forgot.
Bowen then drifted for a time before finding a home of sorts in the Klan movement, although by then it had been largely defanged by the activities of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program: klaverns had folded, its prestige had plummeted, and its average age had begun to drop as older members left or died. The result was that the Klan’s traditionally uneasy relationship with the trappings of neo-Nazism became less ambiguous, the new bloods being less fussy about such matters than the more senior members. Bowen joined Bill Wilkinson’s Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, but by the time the Invisible Empire disbanded in 1993, following an expensive lawsuit, Bowen had already established his own Klan, the White Confederates.
Except Bowen didn’t go recruiting members like the other Klans and even the Klan name was little more than a flag of convenience for him. The White Confederates never numbered more than a dozen individuals, but they wielded power and influence beyond their size and contributed significantly to the ongoing Nazification of the Klan in the 1980s, further blurring the traditional lines between the Klansmen and the neo-Nazis.
Bowen wasn’t a Holocaust denier either: he liked the idea of the Holocaust, the possibility of a force capable of murder on a previously unthought of scale, murder with a sense of order and planning behind it. It was this, more than any moral qualms, that had led Bowen to distance himself from the casual outrages, the sporadic outbursts of violence, that were endemic to the movement. At the annual Stone Mountain rally in Georgia he had even publicly condemned one incident, the beating to death of a middle-aged black man named Bill Perce in North Carolina by a group of drunken klavern rejects, only to hear himself booed off the platform. Since then, Bowen had avoided Stone Mountain. They didn’t understand him and he didn’t need them, although he continued to work behind the scenes, supporting occasional Klan marches in small towns on the Georgia–South Carolina border. Even if, as frequently occurred, only a handful of men took part, the threat of a march still gained newspaper coverage and bleats of outrage from liberal sheep, and contributed to the atmosphere of intimidation and distrust that Bowen needed for his work to continue. The White Confederates was largely a front, a piece of theater akin to the waves of a magician’s wand before a trick is performed. The real trickery was being performed out of sight, and the movement of the wand was not only unconnected with the illusion but largely immaterial to it.
For it was Bowen who was trying to heal the old enmities; Bowen who was building bridges over the divides between the Christian Patriots and the Aryans, the skinheads and the Klans; Bowen who was reaching out to the more vocal, and extreme, members of the Christian right; Bowen who understood the importance of unity, of intercommunication, of extending the funding base; and Bowen who now felt that, by bringing Faulkner under his protection, he could convince those who believed the preacher’s story to redirect their money toward him. The Fellowship had pulled in more than $500,000 in the year before Faulkner’s arrest. It was small beans compared to the kind of cash flow enjoyed by the better-known televangelists, but it represented serious income to Bowen and his kind. Bowen had watched the money flowing into Faulkner’s appeal fund: there was already enough to meet 10 percent of a low seven-figure bail and then some, and it was still coming in, but no bondsman would be crazy enough to cover Faulkner’s bail in the event of a review finding in his favor. Bowen had other plans, other irons in the fire. If they played it right, Faulkner could be out and vanished before the end of the month, and if rumors persisted that Bowen had squirreled him away to safety, then so much the better for Bowen. In fact, it wouldn’t much matter after that if the preacher lived or died. It would be enough that he remained unseen, and he could do that just as easily below ground as above it.
But Bowen also felt an admiration for what the old preacher and his Fellowship had achieved. Without resorting to the bank jobs that had undermined the Order, and with manpower never numbering more than four or five persons, he had carried out a campaign of murder and intimidation against soft targets for the best part of three decades and had covered his tracks brilliantly. Even the FBI and the ATF were still having problems connecting the Fellowship to the deaths of abortion doctors, outspoken homosexuals, Jewish leaders, and the other bugbears of the far right whose annihilation Faulkner was believed to have authorized.
It was strange, but Bowen had barely considered the possibility of allying himself to Faulkner’s cause until Kittim had reappeared. Kittim was a legend among the extreme right, a folk hero. He had come to Bowen shortly after Faulkner’s arrest, and from there, the idea of involving himself with the case had just come naturally to Bowen. And if he couldn’t remember exactly what Kittim was reputed to have done, or even where he had come from, well, that hardly mattered. That was the way with folk heroes, wasn’t it? They were only partly real, but with Kittim beside him, Bowen felt a new sense of purpose, of near invincibility.
It was so strong that he hardly noticed the fear that he felt in the man’s presence.
Bowen’s admiration, spurred into action by Kittim’s arrival, had apparently appealed to Faulkner’s ego, for through his lawyers the preacher had agreed to nail his colors to Bowen’s mast, had even offered up funds from hidden accounts, untraceable by his persecutors, if Bowen could arrange his disappearance. More than anything else, the old man did not want to die in jail; he would rather be hunted for the remainder of his life than rot behind bars whil
e awaiting trial. Faulkner had asked for just one further favor. Bowen had been kind of annoyed at this, given the fact that he was already offering to hide Faulkner from the law, but when Faulkner told him what he wanted Bowen had relaxed. It was just a small favor, after all, and would give Bowen almost as much pleasure as it would give Faulkner.
Bowen believed that, in Kittim, he had found just the man for the job, but he was wrong.
In truth, the man had found him.
Bowen’s truck pulled into the small clearing before the hut, just across the South Carolina state line in eastern Tennessee. The building was dark wood, four rough-hewn steps leading to a porch, two narrow windows on either side. It looked like a blockhouse, designed with defense in mind.
A man sat on a rocking chair to the right of the door, smoking a cigarette. This was Carlyle. He had short curly hair that had begun to recede when he was in his early twenties but had mysteriously arrested its retreat in his thirties, leaving him with a clown wig of fair hair around his domed skull. He was in good condition, like most of those whom Bowen kept close. He drank little, and Bowen couldn’t remember ever having seen him smoke before. He looked tired and ill. Bowen noticed the smell as he approached: vomit.
‘You okay?’ asked Bowen.
Carlyle wiped his lips with his fingers and examined the tips for any detritus. ‘Why? I got shit on me?’
‘No, but you smell bad.’
Carlyle took a last drag on the cigarette, then carefully extinguished the butt on the sole of his boot. When he was satisfied that it was cold, he tore it to shreds and let the breeze carry the remains away.
‘Where did we get this guy, Roger?’ he asked when he was done.
‘Who? Kittim?’
‘Yeah, Kittim.’
‘He’s a legend,’ said Bowen. It had the sound of a mantra about it.
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