Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation

by A. W. Hill

The visitor was seated, as Brigit had described, on a low concrete pillar at the end of the short driveway, the steel toe of his work boot anchored against the right rear tire of Raszer’s rebuilt 1966 Avanti. At first glance, he looked like a rag peddler—if rag peddlers still worked the streets. Too proud for a bum, too straight spined and stalwart for a junkie. On second look, he was John Brown at Harper’s Ferry, complete with nineteenth-century attire, motionless as a figure at Madame Tussauds. It was on that reappraisal that the man, without shifting his broad shoulders an inch, spun his head like an old barn owl and aimed his gunmetal eyes straight at the bay window. The hair bristled on Raszer’s neck, and his diaphragm contracted sharply enough to force the wind out of his lungs, but he stood his ground and did not flinch. He returned the stare with reciprocal severity, then took a very deep breath and let go of the curtain.

  “I told you he was creepy,” Brigit said.

  “And I told you to wait in the library,” he replied, and glared at Monica, who stood wide-eyed, her hands on Brigit’s shoulders.

  “God,” Monica whispered. “He looks like that anti-abortion nut. The guy with the fedora and the raincoat who was always there before a clinic got bombed.”

  “He’s pretty old-school, all right,” said Raszer. “I haven’t seen a hat like that since my grandpa died. I’d pay good money for his brown duster, though.”

  “I don’t recognize him from any of our photo files, do you?”

  “Nope. Hey—”

  Brigit, who had the cunning of a sprite, had slipped out from under Monica’s fingers and stood at the window.

  “He’s crying, Daddy.”

  “Come away from the window, Brigit. Now.” Raszer stepped to the door and peered through its single pane of glass. Sure enough, the old man held his big, bearded head in his hands while his broad shoulders quaked with grief. “I’m gonna go out and talk to him,” said Raszer. “Just be ready to call the sheriff if he pulls a sawed-off shotgun out of that coat.”

  Raszer himself did not keep firearms in the house, and had only rarely found it necessary to carry a gun on assignment. His skills were those of a tracker, not a hunter. As he walked down the rain-slicked driveway, however, he felt distinctly unarmed. He was the perfect target for an act of vengeful mayhem, and the stranger’s torment was as potent a threat as anger. Raszer came to within three yards, then halted.

  “Are you all right, friend?” he called out.

  The old man lifted his head from his left hand. He had a large, aquiline nose, thin lips, and gray eyes with whites the color of beaten egg yolks. His right hand was parked inside his coat, where there was a visible lump. Raszer moved a foot closer.

  “I’m sorry for your grief, sir,” he said steadily. “This weather’s having the same effect on me. But this is a private home, and there’s a child inside. Unless you have business with me—”

  “Stefan Razzer?” the stranger said, his voice deep and clotted.

  Raszer cocked his head. “It’s Stee-van with a long e. Makes it simpler. And the last name is Ray-zer. Believe me, it was even more unpronounceable before my grandfather changed it.” He took a breath. “And who might you be?”

  The man said nothing at first, just held his bloodshot stare. Raszer determined at that moment that this haggard patriarch was not on the trail of a renegade wife. Up close, the look in his eyes was more haunted than accusatory. He was somebody’s father or grandfather, and he was not, despite the sagging brim of his old fedora, a vagrant. None of this made him any less a threat. The lump inside his coat shifted, and Raszer knew that Monica must be growing alarmed. He moved in another step. The old fellow was beginning to teeter like Humpty Dumpty, and Raszer reasoned that if he got close enough, he could unseat him before he had a chance to pull out a weapon.

  “Don’t mean to be ungracious,” he said, “but we’ve had some trouble lately. Would you mind showing me what you’ve got inside your coat?” Raszer put one hand behind his back, where Monica could see it from the window, and dialed an imaginary phone. “Why are you here?” he insisted.

  “To save my daughter’s soul,” the old man said, lips trembling, and suddenly rose up to a height exceeding six feet. Raszer’s mind raced through the possibilities. Was this an oath of blood vengeance or a plea for help? Abruptly, there was no time for thought. He drew his hand from his coat. Raszer feinted right, crouched, and delivered a well-aimed kick to the funny bone, disabling the grip and dislodging the concealed weapon, which fell to the wet sidewalk with a dull slap. As the man staggered, Raszer stepped back and cast a wary glance down. At his feet was a bound stack of Awake! magazines, the publication of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society.

  “You’re a Jehovah’s Witness . . . ” Raszer said, incredulous, staring at the bundle of soggy pulp while his heart settled. The stranger backed away, his offended arm raised in defense. For a moment it looked as if he might turn and run.

  “I’m sorry,” said Raszer. “Truly sorry. I thought . . . are you all right?”

  “Perhaps I’ve come to the wrong place,” the man replied.

  “No, no . . . I don’t think so,” Raszer countered, palms raised in peace. “Tell me what’s on your mind. Tell me about your daughter. Did—did you say her name?”

  “Katy.” A small spasm caused the corner of his mouth to twitch. “Please,” he added. “If I can trouble you for a few moments . . . ”

  Raszer stooped to pick up the stack of magazines and handed them back to his visitor, whom he now assayed to be no more than sixty-two, behind the full beard and parchment skin. “Of course,” he said. “Although we’re not among the anointed here.”

  “You’re the detective. The cult man from the papers.”

  Raszer winced. “Don’t believe everything you read in the papers.”

  The stranger sputtered and doubled over in pain.

  “Easy there,” said Raszer. “Let’s get you out of the rain.” He hoped he hadn’t broken any bones. The last thing he needed was another lawsuit. He put a hand on the man’s back, but the intimacy was unwelcome. The man shook off his pain stoically.

  “My Katy has been taken,” he said, once his wind had returned. “Will you help me find her?”

  Raszer looked up at the window and gave Monica an “all clear” nod.

  “I may be able to do that,” he said. He paused for a moment in the driveway and regarded what the rain had brought in. Redemption comes in strange packages, he thought; this one wrapped up more like his typical adversary than his average client. “If you’ll tell me everything you know about her.” He offered his hand. “I’ve told you my name,” he said. “May I have yours?”

  “Silas Endicott,” the man replied, extending a bony hand. A patrol car rolled up the steep, wet street from Franklin Avenue and executed a U-turn in the cul-de-sac, coming to a stop ten feet away. The cop riding shotgun leaned out.

  “Everything all right here?” the cop asked.

  “Yeah, we’re fine,” Raszer answered. “This is Mr. Silas Endicott of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Just here to make me repent for my sins. Sorry for the false alarm, Officer.”

  The cop smiled and gave the old man a once-over. “He’ll have a long list of ’em to work through with you, Mr. Raszer. No problem. Uh, stay dry.”

  “I’ll do my best,” said Raszer, who was by now soaked to the skin. “You too.”

  Silas Endicott, after a few restorative sips of hot tea, explained that he was an Overseer in what the Witnesses called the Watchtower Society—the herald of the Apocalypse on Earth. If a sect was—by standard definition—small, then the WTS had long since exceeded the standard. Raszer knew that in many nations of the West, it was the second-largest religious denomination. Endicott’s designation made him an elder of the church, but even the elders were obliged to hawk the Watchtower and Awake, and the fellow asserted he’d knocked on every door on Whitley Terrace on his way up the hill, sowing seeds of faith as he aimed for his destination. It was—to Raszer—clear that his g
uest was in a highly agitated state, and possibly not at all well.

  “Your daughter,” Raszer asked. “Is she also a church member?”

  Endicott winced and wrapped his shaky hands around the teacup for warmth.

  “She . . . was raised at my knee in the Kingdom Hall,” he replied. “There never was a more pious little girl, or a better daughter.”

  “And Katy’s mother?”

  “Left us when Katy was six,” Endicott replied, with more than a trace of bitterness. “It was for the best. She was a whore.” From the corner of his eye, Raszer saw Monica lift her pen from the legal pad, not in shock as much as out of curiosity. In the background and just out of sight, Brigit slid down the hallway doorjamb and parked herself on the threshold, all ears.

  “So you brought up Katy on your own?” Raszer continued.

  “Myself and the elders,” the old man replied. “And there were good women in the congregation who helped when she came of age and became a pioneer. She was accepted into the Little Flock when she was thirteen.”

  “The Little Flock,” Raszer repeated, rifling through his mental files. “Those are the folks bound for heaven after Armageddon, right? The anointed class . . . ”

  “You’ve studied our faith, Mr. Raszer?” Endicott raised an eyebrow.

  “Any faith with twenty-two million subscribers worldwide is worth studying, wouldn’t you say? Faith’s too important to be left to the preachers. What motivates it is what drives my work . . . especially when that motivation is suspect.”

  “Do you judge our motivation suspect, Mr. Raszer?” Endicott asked with a glare.

  “I don’t judge, Mr. Endicott. That would only get in the way. I start from the presumption that people need to believe, and as long as what they get back doesn’t harm or bankrupt them, I’m fine with it. But I do question, and I think it’s only reasonable to question a gospel that allows only 144,000 privileged souls a berth in heaven. Those odds would make even a high roller cool his dice.”

  “Perhaps,” said Endicott. “But look around this abode of Satan, Mr. Raszer. Can you honestly say that more than one in four million deserves paradise?”

  “I’ve never doubted the Devil’s reach, Mr. Endicott. I just don’t happen to think that God assigns quotas for salvation.” He tapped his fingers on the table. “But that’s beside the point.”

  “Yes,” said Endicott. “If I were looking for a man of my own kind, I wouldn’t be in Hollywood. I’m looking for someone who understands . . . the other side.”

  “Right,” said Raszer. “Let’s talk about your daughter. How long has she been missing?”

  “As the police in Azusa have it, she was last seen on this earth on February first of last year. But she was lost to me long before that.”

  “We’ll talk about that,” said Raszer. “But let’s get some basics first. Azusa—that’s a fair distance. Is that where you—and Katy—live as well?”

  “Yes. For nineteen of her twenty years. Our lives revolve around the Kingdom Hall. Hollywood is a fifty-minute bus ride away. Not so very far, but then, in three decades I’ve not had cause to descend to this . . . gutter. Not until now.”

  “Well, at least we’ve had rain to wash the garbage away,” said Raszer, neither expecting nor getting a smile. “Tell me about the physical circumstances of Katy’s disappearance. Were there others involved—a boyfriend, girlfriend? Did she pack a bag, leave a note? Is foul play suspected? Tell me what the police know.”

  At that prompting, Silas Endicott remembered to remove his hat, perhaps moved to courtesy by the gravity of what he was about to relate. He set it before him on the table, maintaining a tight grip on the brim. Raszer read the gesture as playing for time, and possibly also as that of a man who feared his daughter was dead.

  “She was up in San Gabriel Canyon,” he began, his head lowered. “On a fire road. An abandoned dance hall from one of those resorts they built back in the 1920s.”

  “Up there past the Morris Dam, right? On the way to Crystal Lake.”

  “On the east fork of the river,” Endicott said. “Closed down years ago because of the mudslides, but the kids . . . that never stops them. They were having—what do they call it when they dance all night, like pagans? All those drugs, all that depravity.”

  “A rave,” said Raszer. “At least, they did in the ’90s.” Uneasiness fell over him like a toxic dew. “I remember this story,” he said. “I was on a case, not paying much attention to the news, but I remember. Kids were hurt. How did Katy fit in?”

  Raszer was suddenly aware of a tremor, like that immediately preceding an earthquake. Instinctively, he glanced up at the overhead lamp to see if it was shaking, then to Brigit, whose toes were visible just inside the hallway, and finally to Monica, whose eyes directed him back to the table and to Silas Endicott’s hands. The source of vibration was in the old man’s breast, transferred through his arms to the solid oak.

  “She’d fallen in with a bad crowd, Mr. Raszer, but why, and by whom, she was taken is not clear.” Endicott’s voice thickened with a mixture of grief, shame, and rage. “The boy who witnessed it was high on pills, and whatever he saw must have . . . ” Endicott released his grip on the brim of his hat and folded his hands in a moment’s silent prayer. After that, he spoke with odd, third-person detachment.

  “Katy left the dance hall with four boys. It was cold up there—the altitude is about thirty-six hundred feet—but she didn’t have a coat on.” He stared blankly, right past Raszer’s left shoulder. “One of the boys was the witness. The other three were animals. They tempted her, plied her with liquor. Lured her up the road to an old Dodge convertible. Told her they had pills in the trunk. Then they . . . they—”

  Monica cleared her throat.

  “I understand,” said Raszer. “Did she manage to escape?”

  “No. Not . . . in the way you are thinking. The fourth boy, the one who gave the story to the police, backed out. He ran into the woods while the others pinned her on the trunk. He testified that while the first boy was assaulting her, a black car came up on the left and stopped. It came out of nowhere, he said. Out of the fog. Three men in dark business suits got out. One of them pulled the boy off her; another picked up Katy and tossed her into the backseat. He stayed with her. The other men threw the boys against the trunk and . . . snapped their necks. One, two, three.” Now, finally, Raszer’s unexpected guest looked him in the eye. “I don’t know, Mr. Raszer, if my daughter met with avenging angels or with a fate even worse than what those hooligans had in mind.”

  “And the boy, the witness . . . was he able to describe her abductors, or rescuers, or whatever they were?”

  “All he could or would say was that they wore dark suits and had dark hair. For all intents, they were without faces.”

  “What about voices?” Raszer asked. “Accents, a foreign language?”

  “No. They didn’t speak.”

  “Any indication whatsoever that Katy knew them?”

  “The boy couldn’t say. It happened too fast.”

  “And the car? I don’t suppose he got a plate, but what about make and model?”

  “It was a Lincoln Continental,” said Endicott.

  “A Lincoln. On a fire road at thirty-six hundred feet.”

  “The police have nothing. Nothing . . . after a full year. My daughter is a face on a milk carton.”

  Raszer squinted, a habit whenever something didn’t fit. The tic, along with his tight-lipped smile, lapis lazuli eyes, and a certain impishness of face, accounted for the fact that even strangers sometimes mentioned his resemblance to Steve McQueen.

  “If this were solely an abduction,” he said, “that wouldn’t surprise me. L.A. County has the most undernourished investigative force in the country. If your child is missing, you might as well be in Somalia. But we’re also talking about a rape and a triple homicide.” He turned to Monica. “What’s been on the wires over the past year? Why hasn’t there been more noise about this story?”


  Monica leaned forward, a strand of streaked hair falling over her right eye. She blew it away with a practiced blast. “The boys’ parents”—she glanced at Endicott—”if I’m not mistaken, Mr. Endicott, were all Jehovah’s Witnesses. The local press, even Fox News, camped out up there for a few weeks, but they got nothing. No interviews, no public statements. And because the assailants were . . . deceased, there were no charges filed, except against the organizers of the rave.”

  Endicott kept his eyes on Raszer. “We are a close community,” he said quietly, “and we take care of our own. This—this event—was a grievous wound. None of us wished to pour salt in it. The Overseers addressed the matter. Twelve young men and women were disfellowshipped, along with two parents who had prior knowledge of the . . . the rave, and said nothing. The bodies of the three . . . the bodies were cremated. We closed the books and we closed our doors, and waited for the plague to pass over.” He sighed deeply and clutched his chest. “The only one left outside was my Katy.”