I finally said, “Let’s get back to the car. Someone may try to track us to this spot.”
As we turned from the river, a fire had been lit inside me. The carnage had to stop. The terrorizing of young girls, the cruel caravans as they were carried off to slavery—it had happened right in front of me. On my watch.
But no more. If God had called me to this, then he would empower me to stop it.
We were halfway to the rental when a pair of headlights came roaring down the path toward us and broke into the open where our Mustang was parked. I recognized the jacked-up pickup as it skidded to a stop. When the driver opened the door and the dome light was on, I knew who he was. The skinhead male with a full beard who had chased us down the highway outside of Port Sulphur.
“Get in the car,” I told Heather, “and lock the doors.”
“But—”
“Now!” I shouted.
The driver stomped toward me. I didn’t see a weapon, but I was already getting the signal. My senses were filled with the old incendiary scent of a landfill on fire; of dead animals, garbage, and death. Which meant that the man coming at me had been taken over by one of the lower-echelon demonic thugs. I knew what would come next: I would soon see the demonic being that had taken him over, in all of its grotesque essence.
When he was about ten feet from me, things started to happen. He hunched his shoulders, and his arms flailed in all directions. Before me, his face transformed into the demonic creature within: the essence of the thing was like some kind of hairy spider with large lifeless eyes.
He screamed in a voice that was high and screechy like an untuned violin, “Why have you come to torment me?”
“Who do you work for?” I demanded. “Who’s your boss?”
“You can’t defeat him. The overlord is too strong. The king of lust and pain. The destroyer of children. He rapes. Ruins. And he’ll ruin you.”
A sudden, inexplicable calm washed over me. I held out a hand to him. “You can be rid of this.”
“Get away,” he yelled. “Leave us alone, or you’ll be chopped up. Fed to the alligators.”
“No, I won’t. You know who I serve. I serve the Son of the living God.”
He shrieked so loudly that it echoed off the river and through the woods, like a creature whose leg had been caught in the jaws of a trap.
I took a few steps toward him. He backed up and stopped, then lunged at me and grabbed me by the throat, no longer the hellish insect creature but a man again, yet there was no power in his grip.
“I am going to help you,” I said as I removed his hands and forced him down to his knees. Then the words, from a place within me, began to flow out. “In the name of Christ the Lord, and by the power of his blood, and by the power of his resurrection, I cast you out, you foul spirit. Get out of this man, into the outer darkness, back to the dry, desolate, godless place where you came from. Out!”
The man screamed, shivered and shook, and collapsed. He was still for a while, lying there on the ground. Then he began to move. After wiping the spittle from his mouth and beard, he looked up, his eyes darting around.
He asked, “Where am I?”
“By the river. At Dead Point,” I said. “Welcome back to the land of the living.”
46
I helped the man to his feet and asked him what he remembered. He recalled very little, except to say that a repulsive but unstoppable darkness had been growing inside him like a cancer, until it took him over entirely. But now, he said with a look of astonishment, “It’s gone. . . . It’s been lifted.”
“Do you know why you are here at Dead Point?”
He shook his head no.
I asked him if he was familiar with a church in Port Sulphur, and he nodded. “Yes, sir. I’ve driven past it. I know it.”
“Good. Go there. See the pastor first thing tomorrow. His name is Wilhem Ventrie. Tell him what happened and that I sent you. I’m Trevor Black.”
When I climbed inside the Mustang, Heather was drop-jawed. “You want to tell me what all that was about?”
“Well,” I asked, “what did you see out there just now?”
“You sort of wrestling with that man. And he shouted. You were on top of him on the ground and you shouted something. Then, all of a sudden, the two of you were talking together like nothing happened. Almost buddies.”
She waited. Then, finally, “So . . . what was going on?”
I said simply, “Deliverance. Rescue.”
Heather was quiet after that.
There was a heavy silence in the car as we drove back to the hotel in New Orleans. Heather was the first to break it. But when she did, she avoided asking about my encounter with the pickup driver.
Instead she went back, several times, in several different ways, to the girl in the window of the boat and whether there was an innocent explanation for it. I wanted there to be, but I told her I doubted it. “The chances that a freak coincidence could have happened exactly like Henry Bosant predicted, at night, forty-eight hours later, going down the Mississippi? Slim to none.”
She was carrying a desperate expression. I said, “Heather, this kind of work will break your heart. But then, it ought to. Look what’s at stake. On the other hand, there’s hope. . . .”
“Oh yeah? I’m not seeing it.”
“Hearts get broken. But I know someone who can fix them.”
I saw a struggling smile. “Yeah . . . I know what you’re talking about. Thanks for the mini sermon,” she said.
Still, I was struggling against desperation myself. No call back from the sheriff’s department. And despite the fact that Heather left a message on Detective Ashley Linderman’s voice mail, asking her to call me, no call from her either.
The toughest question Heather asked was the next one, and the most obvious. “What now?”
I wasn’t sure. Not at first. All I knew was that the sheriff’s department at Port Sulphur needed to know what we saw. But despite what I had just said to Heather, I realized that skeptical minds could still discount it. Especially if they didn’t know the backstory from Henry Bosant.
As we entered the city limits of New Orleans, I called the sheriff’s office once more, this time demanding to be put through to Deputy St. Martin’s voice mail.
I left a detailed message. In accord with what I had promised to Henry Bosant, I omitted any facts that might implicate him personally. But I described everything else: how a credible witness had told me about a child abduction ring operating down the Mississippi with ties to New Orleans, and that boats would periodically motor past Port Sulphur, getting supplies on the water near Dead Point from a smaller tender boat as they headed south toward Port Eads and then eventually into the open waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
I continued my voice mail message, saying, “I wanted to tell you all of that at the sheriff’s department, but before I could, I was placed into custody as a lunatic, cuffed, and carted off to Morehaven.”
In closing I said, “In any case, Deputy, on a tip, I went to Dead Point tonight around nine thirty and spotted a young girl who looked as if she were being held captive in the hold of a forty- to fifty-foot craft heading toward the Gulf as it passed by my position. I saw her in the porthole of the boat, and it appeared she was yelling for help. Exactly as my tipster said would happen.”
I left my cell number and asked that he return the call.
Then I was hit with a last-ditch idea. I asked Heather to look up the number for the local branch of the Coast Guard and place the call for me on my cell so I could talk to them.
I was transferred to the master chief of that sector, and I told him I had evidence of illegal conduct taking place on the Mississippi around the area of Port Sulphur. A possible kidnapping ring, and that the boat was on its way to Port Eads.
Then the predictable answer. “Sir, you need to contact the local sheriff’s department. They’ll decide whether they need our backup for an interdiction.”
I was unable to tie the f
emale abduction cult to the possessed pickup truck driver who encountered us at Dead Point, but I had a strong suspicion that he had been one of the worker bees in the conspiracy. In Reverend Cannon’s words, one of the low-level “henchmen.” Whoever he had been working for, whoever the “overlord” was at the top of the pyramid—“the king of lust and pain . . . the destroyer of children”—he had successfully intimidated his followers through a pitiless exercise of power.
As we drove closer to our hotel, I knew there were still mountains to climb and so much that I still didn’t know. We hadn’t stopped the boat floating past us on the Mississippi. And every hour that passed, more innocent young lives would be swept down a demonic sewer, orchestrated by a level of evil I had never experienced before.
Yet despite all that, something struck me out of the blue. And when it did, I was buoyed. Lifted unexpectedly by a quiet but powerful current. My presence at Dead Point wasn’t in vain after all. Why did it take me so long to realize it? The dark side owned that tough guy in the pickup truck. He was lost. Possessed. But I was there by the banks of the river just in time to meet him. I was used by the same God who raises the dead and rescues the living. And he used me to raise that man from the walking dead and breathe life back into him.
Heather must have seen that in my face, because I was smiling. She bent around from the passenger seat to take a closer look. “Hmm” was all she said, but there was a half smile on her face.
Heather and I caught a late dinner in the hotel restaurant. Conversation was sparse. The exhaustion of the day had set in for both of us. But before I paid the check, I asked Heather what turned into a long, rambling question. “What you’ve experienced lately . . . you know, the ABA convention and my speech, and being approached by that female mystery lawyer, and the goings-on at Bayou Bon Coeur and at Six Flags; then our meeting with Henry Bosant at Dead Point, and my being taken into custody and admitted to Morehaven, and the court hearing; what happened tonight at the river and what we saw, and then the possessed guy in the pickup . . . I was wondering . . .”
“Wondering what?” she asked.
“Well, just wondering what you’ve thought about all of it.”
“I’m still processing it.”
A safe answer. I didn’t blame her.
Then she said, “Look, I don’t want to get into it right now—I’m too tired—but basically, I’m glad I’ve been here. Seeing it all. And seeing it with you. How you fit into this crazy stuff. You’re . . .” She took a moment before she ended it. When she did, she said, “You’re kinda unique, you know? I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”
There was so much swimming just below the surface of her words.
I said, “And it’s not over yet.”
I looked at the fatigue on her face and decided right then that my important conversation with her would have to wait until tomorrow morning. The talk about her real father. Over breakfast. When our minds were fresh.
47
Heather said something to me that night, right before slipping into her hotel room. “Trevor, someday we’re going to talk about what really happened between you and that pickup truck guy at the river.”
I nodded, and we said good night.
In my room, I pulled out my iPad and plugged in my search terms: David Fleming Manitou Wisconsin.
There were some references to his having attended VMI, the military college in Virginia. But then some surprises: according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, at some point David joined the Army, served in Somalia, and ended up being killed in action in the battle of Mogadishu. A war hero, to be sure.
My head was swirling. Not only did I have to tell Heather that I wasn’t her father; I also had to break the news that her biological father had been killed in the horrific fighting in Somalia. I remembered seeing images of dead American soldiers being dragged through the streets by armed rebels. Was Heather’s father one of them? This meant that both of her parents were gone.
I put in a call to Detective Ashley Linderman. Not her regular law enforcement cell, but the other one: the “supersecret” cell that she used for private contacts, informers, and clandestine operations. And for me.
Ashley’s voice. “I knew you’d call me again sometime. And I am assuming Heather is okay . . .”
“Located, safe and sound,” I said.
I could hear the relief in Ashley’s voice when she said she gathered as much when she received the voice mail from Heather.
“Right,” I said, “Heather’s message to you about my being involuntarily committed.”
There was a long pause. “Yeah. So, Trevor, I have to say, that was really a sick joke. Only mildly funny, by the way.”
“Not a joke. More like a tragicomedy.”
“Well,” Ashley said, moving on in the conversation, “I’ve been swamped with cases here in Manitou. Including a double homicide. I planned to call you. In that weird message from Heather she sounded rushed. A little distracted . . .”
“Because I had just been taken into custody and dragged into Morehaven.”
“What’s Morehaven?”
“A mental institution in Louisiana.”
“Uh, wait a minute . . . so you weren’t joking?”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”
“Trevor, how did this happen?”
“Too complicated to explain now. The point being that it was all a mistake and I had to challenge it in federal court, and now I’ve been released. But I have something personal to discuss. Very personal.”
I took a second, then plowed ahead. “Specifically, about your telling me that I was Heather’s biological dad. That was a big deal to me, obviously. And now I learn that what you told me wasn’t true.”
Another pause at the other end, this time longer. “What are you talking about?”
“A psychiatrist at Morehaven showed me the paperwork from the termination of parental rights proceeding when Marilyn gave Heather up for adoption. Don’t ask me how he got his hands on it. In any case, Marilyn listed the father. She put down the name of a high school classmate of mine: David Fleming.”
“Oh, that . . .”
I listened for more.
“Let me think,” she said. “Okay, right. He was some kind of swimmer in high school.”
“Exactly.”
“Joined the Army,” she said.
“Something I just found out.”
Ashley said, “The same David Fleming who was killed in action . . .”
“Same one.”
Then Ashley said, “Yes, he’s the one.”
I waited.
She continued. “In the beginning, Marilyn tried to peg him as the putative father on the paperwork because by then he had been killed. Oh, I don’t know what was going through her mind. Maybe she thought the baby—you know, Heather—could collect some military benefits or something. Or maybe she was trying to protect you from the fallout. . . .”
After letting that shocker sink in, I had a question. “I thought David Fleming went to a military college in Virginia.”
“The social service investigators said he left college almost immediately and enlisted,” Ashley said. “It became clear that this young man would have been in active military service and completely out of contact during the time when Marilyn became pregnant. When Marilyn was confronted with those facts, she recanted, did a one-eighty, and told the adoption people that she didn’t know who the father was. But I was told that after the adoption was concluded, the investigating social worker strongly suspected that the real father was an unnamed student at New York University, and that it was a onetime encounter involving Marilyn and that young man, someone she had known from high school. Of course, that fit you perfectly.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about David Fleming?”
“Because he wasn’t the dad; it was irrelevant.”
“Not to me.”
“Maybe not. But when I told you that Heather had been born and then adopted, and that y
ou were the father, and you were super excited about it, I had this thing for you and enjoyed seeing you so happy. Didn’t want to rain on your parade and all that.”
My mind had been blown. Again.
“So,” I said, “just to be sure. Are you telling me that you know of absolutely nothing that would raise doubts about my being her biological parent?”
“That’s what I’m telling you,” she said.
A hurricane just miraculously evaporated. In a matter of seconds I had experienced a complete reversal of fortunes about Heather. I was her dad again.
“I bet you’re relieved,” she said. “You must have been really bummed about the David Fleming curveball. Truly sorry. I should have told you that.”
Then her tone changed. The detective came out. “You say you got that information from a psychiatrist? That seems odd. Out of place.”
“To say the least. In hindsight, the guy was eminently sketchy. But at the time he was doing a masterful job of poking holes in me and filling me with doubts.”
The call ended with my telling Ashley how great it was to connect and thanking her for the fantastic news, and I promised to keep in touch.
As I lay in bed in the dark, I was buoyed again, riding a second tide. Thankful that Ashley had taken my call and dispelled the false doubts that had hounded me. I had my daughter back. Thank you, God.
But then another image flashed in front of me. The face of that young girl, peering out from that porthole of the boat, mouth open in a silent scream for help.
I imagined that somewhere out there a father was missing his daughter and living in quiet desperation. Continuing to glance at the phone, hoping it would ring; yanking his cell phone out when it did, praying that he would hear the news that she had been found, yet all the time knowing that such a call might never come. And through it all, the father dying a little each day. Like never before, I could relate to that.
I decided that come morning, first thing, I was going to set my mind to the task. With the time I had left, and with the faith and strength that were mine, I had to throw myself against that terror.
The Empowered Page 21