Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation

by A. W. Hill

  “Well, again, we got most of this from Emmett. That’s Emmett Parrish. He’s the boy who got cold feet that night.”

  “Right,” said Raszer, glancing down at the names Sam Brown had given him. “The witness. He was one of Johnny’s regulars, too?”

  “Yeah. According to Emmett, Johnny was into anarchy. He called his little club WARM, for World Anarchist Reform Movement. Had that painted on the trailer, too. He claimed he had ‘brothers’ in the Middle East and other places. Might’ve been bullshit . . . he didn’t know which end he was coming from, and he didn’t care. He had stuff up there about Aryan Nations, the Red Brigades, Hezbollah, and the Freemasons, for chrissakes. All he knew was that everything was wrong, and that all laws were made to enslave. When you added Henry Lee’s magical shit in with it, it was quite a mix.”

  Switches began to click in Raszer’s mind. The first tiles in the mosaic fell into place. “Tell me about Henry. What kind of magic was he into? Silas Endicott called it Satanism. Was it?”

  “Not exactly, although what do I know? That’s your business, right?”

  Raszer cocked his head and waited for the other shoe to drop.

  “You’re the guy who worked that militia cult up in Shasta, right?” Aquino said.

  “How did you know that?” Raszer asked. “I was undercover, I didn’t appear in court, and I wasn’t in the papers—not that time.”

  “Cops have their own Internet,” Aquino said, grinning. He picked up the telephone and shook the cord, making it dance. “It’s called la vina.”

  “Okay,” said Raszer, holding up his palms in surrender. “Fair enough. But for the moment, I’m just a PI looking for a missing girl, and I don’t know anything. So what was Henry’s brew if it wasn’t the usual small-town, heavy-metal Satanism?”

  “My guess is, it was something else the boys brought back from Karbala,” said Aquino, sliding open the top right drawer of his desk. “Along with this.”

  He held up a palm-size piece of black ore, dimpled with little pits. It might have been basalt, or a small meteorite, but it looked a whole lot like Brigit’s moon rock. A lot like the rock that had given Silas Endicott apoplexy and then stopped his heart.

  “May I see that?” Raszer asked. It was heavier than he’d expected.

  “We found a few of these in the trailer, along with some weird little statues,” said Aquino. “It’s technically evidence, but I, uh, kept one as a souvenir. Sometimes, when I get bugged that we never solved this case, I take it out and use it as a paperweight.” He shrugged. “Like it’s gonna talk to me, right?” Detective Aquino’s chair creaked as he sat back heavily. “It’s just iron ore, but of a type found across northern Iran and eastern Turkey. Possible meteoric origin. I have no idea what it meant to Henry or where he got it from over there. The kids who could tell us are either dead, missing, or out of state.”

  “You mean Ruthie?” Raszer said, his eyes fixed on the stone. “Katy’s sister?”

  “Yeah,” said Aquino. “Maybe you won’t have the same jurisdictional problems we do. All we ever found of Henry’s was a book about something called chaos magic. But the best clue, Mr. Raszer—for someone smarter than me—is what we didn’t find . . . ”

  Raszer looked up and slowly closed his fingers around the stone.

  “The best evidence,” Aquino continued, “was on Henry Lee’s body.”

  He spun the file folder 180 degrees, pushed it toward Raszer, and flipped through a few more morgue photos until he came to one detailing the midbody. Henry Lee’s uncircumcised penis lay to the left in repose, but beneath it, there was nothing but a badly healed scar.

  Raszer moved closer in. “Am I seeing what I think I’m seeing?” he asked.

  The cop’s eyes met Raszer’s. “He had himself neutered. And not by an expert surgeon, either. He must’ve done it when he was in Iraq, or after, because his predeployment physical was normal. Now, why would a man do that, Mr. Raszer?”

  Raszer sat back and pushed his fingers through his damp hair. He had some ideas, but none trumped his own puzzlement. “If it was voluntary, I dunno. There are eunuchs all through history, mostly slaves but occasionally saints. A whole range of stuff goes down in the transgender sector, but the cut would have been cleaner. I can imagine a number of reasons it might have been done to him, though, especially in Iraq. Maybe he got caught messing with a local girl. Maybe his appetite for rape didn’t start with Katy Endicott. Did you get a look at his military record?”

  “Nothing but a couple of minor AWOLs and a reprimand for smoking hashish on a weekend leave. No visits to the medic, except for a case of bronchitis.” Aquino pulled a magnifying glass out of his drawer and handed it to Raszer. “Take a look at that scar. According to the coroner, the wound was cauterized. See these secondaries—here at the stem, and there? Those are burn scars. Coroner’s hunch is, the wound was sealed with the flat side of a red-hot knife. Immediately after the cut. If I was a crazy Arab and I’d caught him doing my sister, I don’t think I’d bother with the post-op.”

  “I see what you mean,” said Raszer. “It definitely suggests procedure—either prescribed punishment or self-mutilation.”

  “What about some weird religious thing, Mr. Raszer? Some kind of cult.”

  Raszer pulled in a breath as a substitute for the cigarette he wanted.

  “You’re thinking of Heaven’s Gate, the Star Trek castratis. I dunno. There is one thing that fits, but I’d like to do some work before I conjecture. I’m still trying to get you guys to take me seriously . . . especially now that I know you’re talking about me.”

  Aquino nodded. “If you come up with something, will you let me know?” he asked. “This is still my case, and there’s not a night that it doesn’t cost me sleep.”

  Raszer took out a cigarette and rolled it over his fingers. “I know what that’s like,” he said. “Like having a ghost in the house. I’m gonna grab a quick smoke. Looking at dead people has that effect on me. Care to join me outside?”

  During the break, they talked only of the rain’s mixed blessing: a verdant, blossomed spring that would lead inevitably to a summer of tinder-fueled wildfires. Drought or deluge—in California, you were damned either way. By mid-October, the chaparral would have reached its flash point, and flames could tear through a town like Azusa as freely as huge boulders once had in the days before the WPA and Army Corps of Engineers had fortified the San Gabriels with dams and debris basins.

  “Well,” said Raszer, “I guess you can rest a little easier knowing you’ve got a chain gang up there obliged to fight the fires . . . at the correctional facility.”

  Aquino held the door as Raszer stepped back inside. “I wonder about that,” he said. “I think if things got really hot, they’d just duck the wardens and race the flames into town. I don’t like living downwind from either nuclear plants or prison camps.”

  “I hear you there,” said Raszer. “But that’s the price we pay for paradise, right?”

  Aquino paused just inside the door, out of the desk sergeant’s earshot. “Say, let me ask you something: You said some men do that to themselves . . . ” He made a slicing motion across his groin. “ . . . Cut themselves voluntarily. I hear different things from different people. Can a man still, you know, be a man afterwards?”

  “I think it depends on the man,” said Raszer. “But yeah, physiologically, he can. No sperm cells, of course. The sultans had eunuchs guarding the harems because they didn’t want another man’s bastard claiming the kingdom. To the degree a man’s sex drive comes out of his gonads, it’ll cool him down, but the machinery still works.”

  “I’ve been wondering,” said Aquino, “because in the Polaroids the kids took--”

  “Polaroids?” said Raszer, arching his eyebrow. “I’d like to see those.”

  When they returned to the office, they spoke of the third boy murdered on the night of Katy Endicott’s abduction, the third of her alleged would-be rapists. He was a high school dropout named Jo
seph Strunk, also from a JW family, who’d graffitied his nickname, SKRUNK, across the free walls of a number of buildings in Azusa. Like other aimless teens in this halfway house of a town—neither part of L.A. nor sufficiently distinct from it to give a teenager pride of place—he’d fallen under Johnny Horn’s spell, but unlike the others, he’d apparently enlisted full-time in Johnny’s WARM. His file didn’t offer much else of interest.

  Emmett Parrish, the boy whose account had provided the only firsthand evidence of all three crimes—rape, murder, and kidnapping—seemed likewise a cipher, another kid bound for oblivion, in spite of his fateful decision to opt out of the gangbang and hide in the tall pines.

  “I take it you’ve gotten to know Emmett pretty well,” said Raszer.

  “As well as he will let me know him,” Aquino replied. “He was borderline crazy even before all this happened. In and out of clinics and counseling centers from the time he was five. The Witnesses don’t make it easy on kids who don’t fit in. Church and family are one thing. They come down hard on the parents if the kids act up, and then the parents come down hard on the kids.” He whacked the desk for emphasis.

  “Like the Old Testament law that says a father’s responsible for the sins of his son until he reaches puberty,” said Raszer.

  “Something like that. I belong to an evangelical Christian church, Mr. Raszer, but as far as I’m concerned, the JWs are a cult. The Parrish kid was damaged goods. We were lucky to get a full statement out of him that night, because after that, he just zombied out. Even if the other three had lived and gone to trial for rape, I’m not sure how effective a witness he would’ve been against them.”

  “But you do believe his account . . . ” said Raszer.

  “I do,” Aquino replied, “because it fits with what the rangers found at the crime scene—and because it’s too crazy to make up.” He drummed his fingers on the desk. “I think that night, Emmett Parrish was too scared to lie.”

  “And too scared to make out the Lincoln’s plates, or provide a good description of the abductors. The men in the limo—”

  Aquino shook his head. “When he talks about it, it sounds like a movie. The fog, the black suits, the whole works. But it fits with the way the necks were snapped. The coroner said it was one for the books. Only a strand of nerve tissue left connecting the third and fourth vertebrae. Squeeze a little harder, their heads would have popped off.”

  “Christ,” said Raszer. “What are we dealing with?” He looked hard at the morgue shot of Johnny Horn, trying to glean something—anything—from the grains of silver oxide in the photograph. “What about links between the rave promoters and the abductors? You’ve been through all that, I guess. No drug burns, paybacks?”

  “The rave promoters were two small-time crooks from Irwindale,” said Aquino. “They basically used these dances as a methamphetamine market. They were Johnny’s connection, and the lead dead-ended at a meth lab in Tijuana. No drug lords, no limos.”

  “Was the FBI in on this? Or the DEA?”

  “FBI, yes. For a while. I’ll give you the field agent. You’re welcome to him.”

  Raszer nodded knowingly. “You know, Detective,” he said, “there are a lot of square pegs here. For one thing, I thought the whole L.A. rave scene shut down a few years back . . . after those girls drove their Toyota off the Angeles Crest Highway.”

  “Everything comes to Azusa a few years late, Mr. Raszer—and usually tainted.”

  “Yeah.” Raszer sat back and sighed. “Can I take a look around up there?”

  “Be my guest,” said Aquino. “It’s all still there, but you probably won’t find much. Johnny’s trailer was stripped down to the insulation, and anything not nailed down at the old Coronado Lodge was taken into evidence. I’ll give you the directions.” He opened his drawer and handed Raszer a business card. “If the rangers bother you, tell them to call me. And don’t forget to buy your Adventure Pass or they’ll ticket your Avanti.” He glanced at the wall clock. “You better get up there before the light goes.”

  “You’re right,” said Raszer. “But, uh, before I do . . . can I get a look at those Polaroids?” He nodded to the morgue photos. “I’d like to see what these two boys looked like when they were alive and kicking. And Silas Endicott died before he could give me a picture of his daughter, so I’d better get a look at her.”

  Aquino swung around to his PC and angled the monitor toward Raszer. There was no reason to close the mini-blinds on his north-facing window; the sky above the mountains was as dark as factory smoke. “The actual snapshots are at the courthouse in San Dimas,” he said, “but I had them digitized. It’s amazing what you can do these days with this software. There’s stuff in these pictures you’d never see in the original.”

  “‘To see the world in a grain of sand . . . ’”

  “What’s that?” Aquino asked.

  “Nothing,” said Raszer. “It’s a poem. It just means there’s always something hiding in plain sight, sometimes in layers so deep, you have to think it more than see it.”

  “You’re pretty philosophical for a PI,” said Aquino, with a smile. “But I guess that’s about what I expected. I don’t think you’ll see much poetry in this freak show.” He double-clicked on a .jpg icon and opened up a file that was, at first glance, too murky to register.

  “What are we looking at?” Raszer asked.

  “Let me bring it up a bit,” said Aquino. “This is a little group shot, right after they broke into the hall. Ruthie Endicott set the camera on the, uh, lectern and put the timer on, then ran back into the picture. That’s why she’s blurred. Too bad these kids couldn’t afford a digital camera.”

  “Give me the chronology,” Raszer said, leaning forward. “This is two summers ago, in August, right?”

  “August ninth,” Aquino affirmed.

  “August ninth,” Raszer repeated.

  Aquino nodded. “August ninth . . . the anniversary of the Manson murders.”

  Raszer cocked one eyebrow. “Okay. And give me their ages at this time.”

  Detective Aquino took a pen from the coffee cup on his desk and went down the line, identifying the four children of the apocalypse, one by one.

  “This is Henry Lee, twenty, in living color,” he began. “He’s got his pants on here, but soon you’ll see what’s left of the family jewels in action.”

  The defiant cockscomb of orange hair stood high on Lee’s head. He was naked to the waist, and the tattoo on his breast was clearly visible. In his left hand was a can of spray paint, and he was grinning for the camera.

  Aquino moved his pointer right. “And here we have Johnny Jihad in all his glory. Twenty-two. Notice the T-shirt. You can bet he didn’t buy that in downtown Azusa.”

  Johnny Horn stood almost a full head taller than his compadre Henry Lee. His head was shaved to the scalp, and his blue eyes made the pixels in the digitized image spin like dervishes. Even in sweltering August, he wore a long-sleeved flannel shirt, but it hid neither his steroid-pumped physique nor the Osama bin Laden T-shirt he wore beneath. Judging from his eyes and coiled, predatory bearing, Raszer pegged him as a meth freak. He was formidable, the clear focus of the family portrait.

  “They send him off to fight Islamic terrorists,” Aquino said, “and he comes back one of them. No wonder we’re losing the war.”

  “You said it yourself, Detective. Some boys eat what they kill.” Raszer studied the face and peeled away its onionskin of punk rage. “I doubt the T-shirt says much about his political sentiments, other than fuck you. That guy’s too amped up on his own revelation to be anybody’s sleeper agent. You know, Detective, there’s a long history of Christian soldiers marching off to war and coming back transformed by their encounter with the alien. That was partly the story with the Crusades. Maybe Johnny looked through the scope and saw himself. Maybe he saw his father and knew—after he’d pulled the trigger, anyway—that the ordinary life was over for him.”

  “Well, anyway,” said Aquin
o, “it is now.”

  To Johnny Horn’s left stood Katy Endicott, the only one of the four not looking at the camera. She was looking up at Johnny, but whether with unreserved adoration or what do we do now, Johnny? uncertainty wasn’t clear. The shadow of his big shoulder fell over her eyes, but the cant of her chin suggested a little of both. Having met her father, another towering figure with a zealot’s eyes, another man whose certitude had left her little personal autonomy, it was not difficult for Raszer to read the body language of a devotee. The language said, “Whither thou goest, I will go.”

  She was petite, presumably from her mother’s side, with long brown hair pinned back. She wore—of all things to wear to an orgy of desecration—a simple print dress, hemmed just above the knees. She was a pretty girl, maybe even exceptionally so, but it wasn’t the mimetic prettiness of the girls down in twee San Marino, much less of the mall queens in Sherman Oaks. Two things distinguished her immediately. Like her father, Katy Endicott was an anachronism. Her slim, delicate form could have been cut from the photograph and pasted into one fifty years older without the slightest temporal dissonance. And there was, in the tilt of her head, the parted lips, and the woozy drape of her forearm, a languor, like that of a young novitiate awaiting her first nocturnal encounter with the Holy Spirit, her body an empty vessel of sacrament .