“Well,” he said, “that’s what I mean. Rescue can be visibly spectacular or appear to be very normal. Powerful angelic protectors. In either case, it is heaven-sent.”
Then he added a warning. “As you walk your razor’s edge, there are two extremes. And you must avoid them both. One, wishful thinking. Wishing away all the dark realities of the supernatural war that you are in. On the other side, the equally dangerous obsession with the darkness, allowing the thought of it to dominate your life.”
“My enemy is formidable. You said it yourself. The battle is enormous.”
“Perhaps,” he said. “But not that different, in a sense, from the daily skirmishes with the flesh and the world. The lies we tell and we brush off as trifles. The greedy, unethical deal. The prideful conceit. Manipulating others for gain. The cruel word spoken in anger. You don’t realize the great gift you have been given.”
“And what is that?”
“To visualize the true ugliness of the other side. To see evil and sin at its core, as repulsive as it must be to God. And then to be thankful that you have the power not to be its slave.”
Before I left, Cannon thanked me for coming and talking to him. Then he added something else. Our talks had given him, he explained to me, “a chance to feel useful again.”
I was glad for the old minister. But the conversation simply reinforced that there was a savage force out there with immense, almost unmatched power. And that one of them, without a soul and without mercy, had written my name in blood on my high school friend’s corpse.
48
My dilemma was how to get around. I called Ashley’s super-secret cell and she picked up. I explained about my damaged Fiat. She sounded nonplussed and said simply, “Jim has a second car that he doesn’t need.”
“Who is Jim?”
“My brother.”
“You never told me you had a brother.”
“You never asked.”
She told me that when her brother, Jim, had left for military duty in Iraq, he had a classic car, but after he had returned he decided to buy a new car, though he still didn’t want to part with his 1975 Ford Fairlane, which was an official antique. I guffawed, and Ashley asked why.
“I drove a Ford Fairlane, a ’68, back when I was a wild child here in Manitou.” Then I added, “You sure he trusts me with it?”
“I’ll vouch for you.”
Two hours later Jim came cruising into the parking lot in his Fairlane. He was much bigger than Ashley, broad-shouldered, but his face resembled hers a bit.
“Mr. Black?” Jim extended a hand, and I shook it. “Ashley’s told me all about you.”
“Probably a terrible shame she had to go that far.” We both had a laugh over that.
As he drove me to the hardware store where he was an assistant manager and where his new car was parked, we chatted briefly before he cut to the chase. “Mr. Black, Ashley told me some of what you believe about God, the devil, heaven and hell, and all that.”
“Yes, all of that. And more. Jesus came to put a stake through the heart of the devil. And death. And the grave. And sin. But he had to suffer torture and execution on a cross in order to do it. The sacrificial lamb. But also a lion, who’s going to put an end to the evil empire.”
He broke into a grin. “I gotta say, I’m in tune with all that. I’m fighting the good fight, same as you.” But then he added, “My sister, though? Not so much.” As we pulled into a parking spot, he shut off the engine and turned to face me. “I can tell my sister has a lot of respect for you. Maybe even more than just respect. Not many men she’d go to bat for. And that pulls a lot of weight with me. But I’m still her big brother, so I have to tell you, she’s had too much heartbreak already.”
I inhaled a long, slow breath, picturing the brokenhearted people in my wake: Marilyn, Courtney. Women I thought I’d loved. Maybe I did love them in some way, but not the right way. “I’ve had some heartbreak myself. I’m not interested in causing any more—especially to your sister.”
Jim nodded sharply and extended his hand. Nuff said.
“Can’t believe you’d entrust a beauty like this to a stranger,” I said, patting the dashboard.
“You’re no stranger,” he answered with a big grin. “You’re a brother soldier, fighting against the dark side and standing for the light.”
Before setting out in the Fairlane, I put a call in to the Opperdill Real Estate Development Company. A secretary answered. I asked for “Henry, the expediter.” That was the name mentioned by Opperdill during our chat in his mini-mansion.
She paused. “I don’t know who you mean.”
“Sure you do,” I said confidently, and repeated it. “You know, the expediter . . . Oh, wait,” I added. “Henry doesn’t work there anymore.”
“I am afraid not,” she said. “Henry Franklin’s been gone for a while.”
Armed with Henry’s last name, I drove the Fairlane over to the Manitou courthouse again. This time to the real estate office, where I did a title check and located a piece of property out in the country that was listed to him. A plot in a trailer park.
In search of Henry Franklin, I drove along Route 59 until it intersected Shore Road. The surrounding area was remote, with open farmland. There was a storage facility on the other side of Route 59 across from the entrance to Shore Road. It had a few rows of big metal pods and some yellow safety lights and what looked like a surveillance camera on top of a metal pole.
Taking a turn down Shore Road, I found that it ultimately transitioned into a dirt driveway, marked with a rusting sign that read, Water’s Edge Trailer Park.
But the “park” was now history. Instead, I found several cement pads with weeds growing around them and electric plug-in posts for trailers, most of them bent or with wires hanging out of them. There was a black, three-legged barbecue tipped on its side, a few broken toys, and a trash can. The trees and bushes had overgrown the area from both sides, and there was a tangle of spindly willow branches hanging down like bony fingers and growing into each other from opposite sides, creating a tunnel effect. The place was scoring high on the creep factor.
At the very end of this tunnel of unchecked growth there was a pickup truck. But it was parked in front of something that was oddly out of sync with the trashy ambience of the place: a gleaming forty-five-foot Zephyr RV with an artisan paint job. It must have cost Franklin, or someone, a bundle.
As I approached, I heard the rushing water of Little Bear River in the distance. I also noticed, not far from Franklin’s luxury RV, a fire pit that was rimmed with large rocks, and around it a scattering of empty bottles and globs of melted wax. Something that had once been alive had been recently burned there, a fact that I found to be both disgusting and intriguing. I would ask Franklin about that if I had the chance, but not at first.
I knocked on the door of his RV, and Henry Franklin opened the door a few inches and asked who I was and what I wanted. He was an unshaven man in a T-shirt, somewhere in his fifties or sixties, but hard to tell because his face had a weatherworn look to it.
“I’m a private investigator looking into the Bobby Budleigh murder, and I heard that you saw Bobby shortly before the murder.”
He eyed me carefully, then asked, “You from the defense lawyers?”
I put on my best placid, reassuring face. “I’m neither with the defense nor with the prosecution. I’m just after the truth, which is the least I could do for my old school pal Bobby. Is there anything you can tell me about your conversation with him?”
He said, simply, “I don’t know where you got your information.”
“Didn’t you talk to Bobby Budleigh, the murder victim?”
“Yeah.”
“Shortly before the murder?”
He snorted. “Course not.”
“Then when?”
“A bunch of months before I read about it, you know, about how they found his body by the creek.”
“Pebble Creek?”
“Yea
h.”
“Is that where you met him, several months before?”
“Listen, mister, I don’t know what you’re after.”
“But it was in that area, right? Near the boundary line of the land owned by Opperdill Real Estate Development Company?”
He nodded, then began to close the door slightly. But then something must have snapped in his head, and he suddenly swung open the door and stepped halfway out. “Are you from Opperdill?”
I assured him that I wasn’t there on behalf of his former employer. Then I told him that what I really wanted to know was why Bobby was out there in the first place.
Franklin stared me down. Finally he gave me one word. “Environmental.” There it was again, the same thing I had heard before.
“Bobby said that to you?”
“Yup.”
“Anything else?”
“Can’t remember.” Then he added, “I got to go . . . , ” and started to close the door again.
I shouted through the two-inch opening, “You know this makes you a witness in the murder case.”
“So what?”
“It means the defense is going to dig up any dirt they can against you. It’s called impeachment. And they’ll make it very public. Are you ready for that?”
“So?” Franklin said, and then twisted his head slightly to one side like he had a kink in his neck. “I got nothing to hide.”
I glanced over at the fire pit. “Really?” I said.
Franklin reversed directions and was coming out the door again. He was squinting and rotating his head some more. I am guessing that he hadn’t taken me for someone who knew a few things about criminal law. He shouted, “Get off my property.”
I motioned back to the fire pit and the charred remains in the middle of it. “By the way, is that the carcass of a dog that was burned in that pit?”
“What’s it to you?”
“Just curious.” Then I added, “Your dog?”
I could see the wheels turning. He had to give me some kind of dodge, anything, or else he’d have to face the animal warden. “Sick dog. Old. Put him out of his misery.”
I nodded. “Just seems odd, that’s all.”
Henry Franklin went even more slit-eyed. “Why’s that?”
I finished. “You know, because of those long knives sticking out of that dog’s side. Three of them. And with ornate handles too.”
Franklin barked back. “Like I said, sick dog. Don’t have money for vet bills.”
I couldn’t resist one last question. “How did you come by this fancy RV?”
His jugular was pumping when he yelled, “Get outta here!”
As I drove away, I noticed in my rearview mirror that Franklin was bending over the dead dog in the fire pit, yanking the knives out of the carcass.
When I drove to the end of Shore Road and turned onto Route 59, I noticed once again the yellow security lights of the storage facility across the road. And I made a point again of checking out the security camera on top of the pole.
But I was still thinking about Franklin’s place back there. An occult-looking fire pit complete with melted candles and a sacrificed dog. Henry Franklin’s outpost was oppressive. Like visiting an ancient place made famous for violence or defilement. Not knowing the particulars, I was somehow certain that evil resided there.
49
I texted a message to Ashley’s super-private cell number. I apologized for bugging her on “official” business contrary to Sheriff Butch Jardinsky’s directive, but I needed to know what Henry Franklin told the police about Bobby Budleigh’s explanation for tromping around the Pebble Creek area in Manitou.
A few minutes later I received the reply. Yes, Mr. Black, you should apologize. But okay, just this once: the supplemental statement from Franklin to our department quoted Bobby Budleigh as telling him that he was there on environmental business. So, you’re welcome.
That matched what both Jeffery Opperdill and Henry Franklin had told me. And it moved me not an inch further in solving Bobby’s murder.
I was coming up with zero. I tried another angle.
Okay, just one more. In return, I will take you out to another fine dining experience. Money is no object (not literally). Storage facility at the intersection of Route 59 & Shore Road. Surveillance camera pointing toward the entrance to Shore Road. Let’s check license plates of the cars going in/out of Shore Road. Begin a day or two before Wendell Quarlet’s death & end a few days after that. FYI—Shore Road only leads to one house, the RV home of Henry Franklin in a weird (spooky) setup in a former trailer park. I have a feeling about this.
A feeling? You have to be kidding. Getting a warrant for the surveillance footage of a private company? Based on what?
Franklin was the only witness having contact with Bobby Budleigh during his prior visit to Manitou a few months before his death. When Bobby returned the second time, just recently, he was murdered. Let’s identify who has been visiting Henry Franklin. Find out the company he keeps.
It took thirty seconds for Ashley to respond this time.
Seriously?
How could I reply to that?
Forty-five minutes later Ashley texted me back, saying she would look into it, but I shouldn’t count on anything because it was a real stretch, and if she lost her job because of me, she would come looking for me, and when she did, she would come “locked and loaded . . .”
It was impossible to tell whether she was joking.
I checked into the YMCA in Manitou, an old six-story building that had tiny rooms for rent with one communal bathroom per floor. I was hoping that the deputies, if they were still looking for me, would pass over that kind of place. They’d assume it would be below the dignity of a former high-priced lawyer from New York City to stay at the Y. Once upon a time, they’d have been right.
In my little room I spent that evening reviewing my situation.
Bobby’s death was not just another homicide. I, of all people, knew better. The circumstantial facts about his murder and mutilation were part of a blood trail. And it traced all the way back to New York City and to the nasty men there who had been occupied by fallen creatures. But there was still more, and the dark specter that had appeared in my hotel room proved it. They were tracking me. Exactly as Elijah had said.
I had Elijah’s Bible in hand, which by then was my Bible, actually, so I buckled down to study. I counted about a hundred New Testament mentions of demonic activity. Jesus exorcised demons at will, and they knew him by name, and they knew the names of some of his followers too. Sometimes they came in legions. Sometimes alone. Nonphysical beings, wandering in a state of invisible, forsaken desolation, seeking humans to inhabit. Why was that? I wasn’t sure. Maybe for relief, or to enlarge their power. But I had met them myself. I knew their hideous power.
I also knew that the modern scientific approach rejected all of that and resorted to psychology or sociology to explain it. Demon activity passed off as mental illness or social dysfunction, or even drug addiction. I didn’t have the expertise to parse that all out. Except to conclude that the science could not explain it. Behind the physical, empirical world was an unseen spiritual one. I was certain of that, not only from what I had seen and heard and now knew to be true from the surety of my own journey, but also from what was written there, in black-and-white, in the New Testament accounts from the testimony of multiple eyewitnesses.
The question was next steps. My ten-by-ten room in the YMCA was feeling too cramped, so I took the fire exit stairs down to the first-floor lobby to get some air. Two of the local residents of the Y were playing a lively game of foosball at a game table. I picked up a copy of the local newspaper from the stack on the lobby desk and walked outside as I leafed through the first few pages.
On page two, I ran into the story about the murder charges against Donny Ray Borzsted. A preliminary hearing was scheduled in his case for the next day, with Judge Martha Prescott presiding. The timing of my reading the article couldn’
t be an accident.
My next move was painfully obvious. Preliminary hearings are usually open to the public. As an ex–criminal defense attorney, I needed to be there. I couldn’t rely on the details in newspaper reports or on secondhand information from Ashley, even if she was free to share it with me. I needed to hear the testimony myself and then sort it out. Decide, once and for all, if someone other than Borzsted was Bobby’s killer as I suspected.
Which raised the issue of Sheriff Butch Jardinsky’s order for my apprehension. The courtroom would be packed for the prelim. Could I slip through the police security check at the front door unnoticed and then seat myself inconspicuously in the crowded courtroom?
The more I thought on it, the nuttier it sounded. The easy thing would be to stay away from a courthouse full of police and prosecution lawyers. That way I could remain free, presumably to get to the truth. But how was I going to do that if I avoided getting a front-row view of the prosecution’s evidence involving Bobby’s death?
One alternative was good, but risky. The other was safe, but ineffectual.
As I looked at the cars passing in the night along Grant Avenue, the newspaper clutched in my hand, I needed a tiebreaker.
Minutes went by. More car lights cruising past. The slow, lazy sound of bugs in the night gathering at the portico light where I was standing. Then things cleared in my head.
In Chicago I told Dan Hoover that I was on a mission from God, and if that was true, and if I had to be in that courtroom the next day, then okay, done. Decision made. It was time to put faith into action.
50
When I arrived at the Manitou courthouse the next day, there was good news. The city police were doing the security checks at the front entrance. I knew that Sheriff Jardinsky had sent the request for my apprehension to those officers, too, not just to his county sheriff’s deputies. But even so, different law enforcement agencies had different priorities. Possibly less vigilance at the courthouse entrance. Maybe I could slip through.
The Occupied Page 23