Southern Cross

by Jen Blood

Clearly, the woman had a death wish. “It’s not your equipment, you—” Juarez intervened before I pulled her away from Diggs’ computer by her bleached blonde ‘do.

  “It’s all right, Mandy,” he said calmly. “Let her take over.”

  Mandy got up, purposely bumping into me when she brushed past. Juarez grabbed my arm before I went after her.

  “Let it go,” he said under his breath.

  Right. Instead of beating up the technology Nazi, I took her seat and got to work.

  It only took two tries to get in. Juarez looked at me in surprise. I shrugged.

  “Lucky guess.”

  Blaze came over and looked over my shoulder. I stopped typing and turned around.

  “I’ll let you know when I find anything,” I said.

  “There may be files you’re not familiar with that are relevant to this investigation.”

  I didn’t budge. Diggs’ entire world was on his computer—he didn’t let anyone in there. Not even me. Certainly not Big Brother.

  “Can you give us a second?” Juarez asked Blaze. She nodded and walked away. I didn’t even look at him as he pulled up a chair beside me.

  “We need to get in there, Erin,” he said. “We have programs that will scan the files in a matter of minutes; it won’t even be people looking at them.”

  “Not at first,” I said. “But what about when the keywords you’re looking for come up? Then, people will be going through everything here. And what happens when national security keywords that don’t have anything to do with Barnel start popping up? His work is important too, Jack.”

  “Erin,” he said seriously. He leaned forward in his chair and took my hands in his. There were maybe a dozen people in the room, and I realized that all of them were waiting for me. “This isn’t negotiable. We’ll be as sensitive as we can be, but I can’t make any promises. You can oversee things if you like—let us know if there’s a file that we think is pertinent but you know isn’t. That’s the best I can do.”

  I pulled my hands away and nodded. I got up abruptly, nearly knocking my chair over in the process. “Yeah, you’re right. Go ahead.”

  Mandy came back over, just a trace of a smug smile on her lips when she reclaimed her chair. We had six hours to find Diggs—there wasn’t time for me to get into it with her now. Jack put his hand on my shoulder awkwardly while I stood by, arms crossed over my stomach, watching as they picked Diggs’ life apart.

  I excused myself after a few minutes and commandeered a computer, intent on doing a little investigating of my own.

  I started with Marty Reynolds—the anomaly in all this. I knew why Billy Thomas was dead; I knew why Wyatt was dead. I wasn’t completely clear on the reason for Roger Burkett’s death, but the fact that it came on the heels of all this other violence suggested it had something to do with Barnel and Company’s grand plan. But Marty Reynolds just seemed so random.

  After I’d done some digging, though, I found I wasn’t any clearer on motivation. He had a lengthy rap sheet: drugs, violence, everything we’d already found before. On a whim, I pulled up his wife—the woman he was suspected of killing. I found a photo of Glenda Reynolds online from an article in 2001 about the local Qwik E Mart, where Glenda worked as a cashier. She was surprisingly pretty: tall and slender, with long dark hair and striking eyes. Twenty-three at the time, she was younger than her husband by seventeen years.

  I didn’t find her maiden name until I pulled up the marriage announcement in the local paper, dated July 15, 1999. Glenda Clifton to Marry Marty Reynolds Saturday, July 18. Clifton didn’t ring any bells for me, but I looked her up anyway. She’d been Junior Miss Kentucky Stars in ’90, won blue ribbons in 4-H for horsemanship four years running, and made straight A’s up until her junior year in high school. She dropped off the map in ’92, no longer mentioned in any archived articles I could find online. If this were a real investigation with a manageable deadline involved, I’d head to the local library from there and look up hard copies of everything I could find.

  Since the world was ending in six hours, however, I didn’t really have that luxury.

  Instead, I managed to find Glenda’s birth certificate and Googled her parents.

  Pay dirt.

  Glenda’s father was killed in a car accident in 1991. That year, I found an article on Jesup Barnel, with Glenda’s mother pictured with a group of six others listed as new members of Barnel’s church. Then, I looked for articles and images from Barnel’s church youth group, since Glenda would be about the right age for that.

  The fifth photo I pulled up told the story I’d been looking for:

  Jesup Barnel stood with about fifteen teenagers, all of them looking appropriately pious. Glenda Reynolds had changed since her days as Miss Kentucky Stars. Now, she wore her hair shorter and her dress much longer. She stood beside Jesup Barnel, his arm around her shoulders in an unmistakably proprietary way. Glenda’s own posture was tense, and you couldn’t miss the way she tried to hold herself apart from the reverend.

  I had no proof, but I was still willing to stake my reputation on it: Jesup Barnel had been sleeping with Glenda Reynolds, back when she was still Glenda Clifton. And Glenda, sixteen at the time, hadn’t been happy about it.

  I called Juarez and Blaze over and they listened to my theory. Blaze hedged as soon as I was finished.

  “You may have a point in all this, but I’m not sure what it has to do with today. Even if Barnel was molesting this girl, and that had something to do with the reason Marty Reynolds was murdered… I don’t know how that leads us to what he has in mind tonight. We can follow up on it later—right now, I need my people focused on more immediate leads.”

  “And what are those leads, exactly?” I asked. I was well aware of the edge to my voice.

  Blaze hesitated. “We’re looking at Billy Thomas’s childhood home right now.”

  “What about Barnel’s childhood home?” I asked. “For all we know, going back to the beginning means going back to Barnel’s roots.”

  “We’ve got agents there now,” Jack said quietly. “Erin, you need to believe that we know what we’re doing here.”

  I nodded, though I was far from through yet. “What about Diggs’ files? Have you found anything?”

  I followed Blaze back to the Technology Nazi’s desk. The Nazi was immersed in her task of dissecting Diggs’ inner life; she didn’t look especially pleased to be interrupted. Or to have to admit, once again, that she might need my help.

  “I’ve set aside a dozen folders here that look suspicious, but we haven’t found a direct relationship to Jesup Barnel.” She looked me up and down for a minute. “You’re Solomon?”

  “Yeah,” I said. I pushed her out of the way and sat down. “Why?”

  “No reason,” she said primly. “You just take up an awful lot of space on his hard drive.”

  Juarez was standing beside me, hovering just over my shoulder. He glanced at me, then back at the computer, doing his best to pretend none of this pertained to him. Or us.

  “We’ve known each other a long time,” I said. I refused to give her the satisfaction of trying to justify it beyond that.

  “So I gathered,” the woman said. She walked away.

  “You really know how to get on people’s good sides, you know that?” Juarez asked.

  “I’m not going for Miss Congeniality here. I just want to find Diggs.”

  “Yeah,” Juarez said shortly. “I got that.”

  He left me to my work.

  Of the dozen questionable files the Nazi had saved to Diggs’ desktop for easy reference, nine I identified immediately: stories Diggs had either finished or been working on over the past couple of years. Three others were encrypted, and apparently no one thus far had been able to break that encryption. One was labeled simply ‘Hood,’ but I knew it immediately: that would be Mitch Cameron, our hooded man. I couldn’t identify the other two.

  “You can try these two,” I called over my shoulder. The Nazi returned, J
uarez on her heels.

  “You’re sure about the others?” she asked.

  “Positive,” I said. “And I’m assuming you’ve already found the primary folder he had.”

  “Of course,” she said, like I’d suggested something completely idiotic. “It’s mostly names and newspaper clippings. He’s very thorough.”

  “He’s good at what he does,” I said.

  For just a second, I thought I saw a glimmer of humanity in her eyes. “We wouldn’t be doing this if he wasn’t.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  DIGGS

  05:30:49

  When I came to, it was to a red glow and nausea and the cotton-throated feel of chemicals in my blood.

  “Diggs?” someone whispered. I opened my eyes wider, searching for the source. The world came into focus and suddenly Danny was there, kneeling beside me.

  “Where the hell are we?” I asked. I tried to sit up. I failed. My hands were bound behind my back, plastic ties cutting into my wrists.

  “Give yourself a minute,” Danny said. “It’ll get better—you’ve just gotta adjust.”

  My synapses weren’t firing right. I stayed where I was and counted down from ten, slowly, before I finally forced myself upright.

  “If you’re gonna puke, do it that way,” Danny said. He nodded toward my right. My stomach rolled at the stench.

  For the first time, I realized we weren’t alone. I looked around, trying to focus on the details. About a dozen people were gathered in the small space. The dirt floor was damp and cool beneath me, but the rest of the room was suffocatingly warm. The entire scene was lit by a bare red bulb mounted above a very solid-looking steel door.

  “Who else is here?” I asked.

  “Casey,” Danny said. “A friend of mine from this band—”

  I nodded impatiently. “I know who she is.”

  “Right,” Danny said. “Yeah, she told me you guys talked. And there’s a couple kids from school.” He lowered his voice. “And there are some other guys, too. It’s not a good crew, Diggs.”

  He wasn’t kidding. I counted at least three tweakers just going into withdrawal, another couple of burly guys with a look in their eye that intimated deep-seated anger and a tradition of violence. I thought of the shacks we’d come across the day before: crosses burning in the front yard, trash and debris inside. We’d already found the kids… Apparently, this was what had happened to the adults.

  “So, I’m assuming you don’t know where we are,” I said. The nausea was fading, and with it that sense of panic. I was alive. So was Danny.

  That was something.

  “We don’t know,” Danny said. “They only bring us here while we’re out of it. No idea how long it takes—we reckon we’re not far out of town, though.”

  “Somebody’s cellar, most likely,” someone else said. A teenage boy with dirty gauze on one side of his face, a yellowish fluid seeping through the bandage. I recognized him immediately: the boy I’d spoken with about his friend just after the explosion Thursday night.

  Danny shook his head. “You kiddin’? How many houses you know with underground rooms and halls and passages that go on forever? It’s gotta be something else. Rick did this project about all the places in Justice with secret tunnels underneath them. This has to be one of those.”

  “How many people are here?” I asked.

  “You make eleven,” Danny answered promptly. “I was alone for a long time, then they brought a few folks in. They been throwin’ ‘em in pretty steady for the past few hours, though.”

  For the first time, I noticed a timer mounted beside the door, digital numbers counting backward.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  Danny didn’t say anything for three seconds—I watched them tick by in fire engine red. Then:

  “That’s all the time we got,” he said. “I don’t know what happens when the numbers run out, but I get the feeling it won’t be good. The reverend said we had to make our peace. Beg forgiveness.”

  I stared at the clock as the seconds counted down:

  05:09:20, 05:09:19… Five hours ‘til midnight, and whatever Barnel had promised came to pass.

  I tried to get my head back in the game. Five hours wasn’t a lot to work with, but it was something.

  “What about sounds?” I asked.

  “There was a boiler room—heard that pretty clear. And there’s music once you’re outside this room.”

  That brought me out of my stupor. “What kind of music?”

  “Good stuff, actually,” he said, sounding surprised. “They were playin’ Blonde on Blonde, I think, when Jenny Burkett come to get me. Then maybe Chuck Berry.”

  “So, nothing religious?”

  “Nope. It’s not coming from them—one of the guys got mad about it when he was takin’ me.”

  I felt a sudden surge of hope. Blonde on Blonde would have made Jake’s top twenty-four list without a doubt. As would Chuck Berry—probably The Great Twenty-Eight. Most of the area had no power, so what were the chances we were in someone’s basement while they cranked WKRO? Slim, at best. It was a good lead, I was sure of it. I just wasn’t sure where it was leading.

  The rest of what he’d said suddenly clicked. “Hang on—you said Jenny Burkett? She’s here?”

  I wasn’t actually surprised to hear the name: from the start it had seemed like too much of a coincidence that Wyatt and Roger Burkett were last seen at Jenny Burkett’s place. Add to that the fact that the sheriff made no effort to bring her in and it only made sense.

  Danny lowered his eyes and nodded. “She’s how come I’m here in the first place… I heard her whisperin’ to me outside Casey’s place. When you see her, you’ll get it. You take one look at her, hear a little sweet nothin’ from that pretty mouth, and you’ll risk just about anything for a taste.”

  I let that go. I’d been seventeen before; if memory served, there weren’t a lot of women on the planet for whom I wouldn’t have risked anything if I thought the promise of sex—or anything close to it—was on the table.

  “Do you know who else is behind this?” I asked. “Have you talked to Barnel?”

  “We all talked to the preacher,” the other teenage boy said. “You’ll get your chance soon enough. Gotta make your confession. He don’t mention anybody else, though. Just him and Jesus.”

  “Well—them and Jenny,” Danny agreed.

  “She’s been draggin’ us back and forth, doin’ whatever Barnel wants,” Danny continued. “There’s a big guy, but I haven’t seen his face. So far we make out one other guy besides Barnel, but we reckon there must be more.”

  “And you don’t recognize any voices?”

  “Nope, not so far. Seems like they know what they’re doin’, though. They know how to keep us in our places, keep everybody quiet.”

  Yet another sign of the organization Blaze had been talking about earlier. There was no way in hell Jesup Barnel could pull this off on his own. I set aside the maddening question of who he was working with, and focused on more pressing issues.

  “Have you looked for a way out?” I asked.

  “No,” Danny said with a practiced roll of the eyes. “We been sitting here playin’ Tic Tac Toe, hopin’ for a miracle.”

  “No need to get snippy,” I said. “What’d you find?”

  ”Not much,” he said. “There’s just the one door leading in here. Floor’s dirt. Walls are cement. I can’t find no wires or pipes, so wherever we are, we’re far enough out of the way that they don’t put the electrical or the plumbing through here. We got the bare bulb and our countdown clock. Not much to work with.”

  I nodded. It wasn’t much to work with at all.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  SOLOMON

  04:45:11

  I started to panic at around seven o’clock that night. It wasn’t that I was all that calm before then, of course… I was just much, much less calm by the time seven o’clock rolled around. Jessie Barnel still hadn’t come
to, which didn’t bode well. We’d gone through city hall, the wreckage of Billy Thomas’s old home, the old farmhouse where Reverend Barnel was raised, the church where he first started preaching, the church where Billy Thomas took his first communion… We had Feds and the National Guard and sniffing dogs and everything in between, scouring the entire county.

  And still, we had nothing.

  There was one more lead I’d been avoiding up to this point—partly because I knew the Feds had already been all over it. And partly because I really, really didn’t want to go there.

  I couldn’t see my way clear of avoiding it any longer, though. I got up from my seat in front of the computer and found Blaze, standing beside a giant interactive map of the county. You could barely see the actual map for all the dots and dashes and highlighted lines covering it. She looked up when she saw me.

  “You have anything?” she asked hopefully.

  I shook my head. “But I had an idea.” I hesitated. She raised an eyebrow, a look in her eye that suggested I’d do well to tell her that idea sooner rather than later. “You said you have video footage of Barnel’s rituals—of him branding those boys in the church?”

  “That’s over a thousand hours of tape, Erin.”

  “I know that,” I agreed. “I don’t need to see all of it. Just four of the rituals: Marty Reynolds, Wyatt Durham, Roger Burkett… and Diggs.”

  “We’ve looked at them all. I don’t know how helpful they’ll be. And Diggs’ tape... ” She hesitated. “Well, let’s just say it’s not for the faint of heart.”

  So, I’d been right: she had watched the tape. “It doesn’t matter. I’d still like to see them,” I said.

  She nodded. “I’ll have someone get them for you.”

  They set me up with a VCR and an old TV in a cubicle in the corner. I set my pen and paper down. Put on giant headphones. Turned on the TV.

  Marty Reynolds was thirteen when he was ‘exorcised,’ back in 1973. The A/V equipment was primitive back then: terrible sound, fuzzy picture. Reverend Barnel’s hair hadn’t gone grey yet, and he was carrying a few less pounds. Otherwise, he was pretty much the same lunatic I’d seen at Miller’s Field the other night.