“The girl is of no concern to you.” Joshua wagged his finger.
“She’s my niece,” Hannah said. “I want to make sure she’s OK.”
The woman disappeared inside with the child.
Joshua watched her go. “You’ve upset her.”
“Maybe she’s upset because she gave up her daughter,” Hannah said.
“Jenny is blessed. She’s a chosen one.”
“Blessed?” Hannah’s eyes grew wide with anger. “Are you out of your mind?”
“Faith is a gift from above. I wouldn’t expect you to understand.” He looked at me. “Who are you?”
“I’m a police officer.” The lie slipped effortlessly off my tongue. “How about if we come inside and take a look around? Then we can sit down and talk.”
“Elohim, protect me from the darkness.” He raised both arms toward the sky. “Beelzebub walks among us.”
I looked at Hannah. “I’ll take that as a no.”
Joshua reached a hand inside the doorway and pulled out a double-barreled shotgun, a side-by-side. The gun was as ragged as he and the woman in the dirty dress. The bluing on the barrel was worn away, and the stock appeared cracked, held together with black electrician’s tape.
He cradled the weapon awkwardly in both hands, barrels pointing toward the ground.
I said, “Put down the gun, Joshua. We just want to talk.”
He strode toward us. Every couple of steps, he glanced in either direction.
“I just want to make sure Jenny is OK,” Hannah said. “Surely you care about your own daughter, too?”
He was almost to the edge of the yard. We were still in the middle of the street.
“Let’s get out of here.” I grabbed Hannah’s arm.
“The power of Elohim makes the evil one flee,” Joshua shouted. “Behold Elohim’s grace.”
I tried to pull Hannah toward the other side of the street. She wouldn’t budge.
A man emerged from the house next door. He was skinny and pale, too, wearing overalls in similar condition.
Joshua glanced at him and then moved closer to us. When he was about five feet away, he whispered, “Will you bring her back?”
Hannah’s eyes went wide.
“Please,” Joshua said. “Save my daughter. Say you will.”
“Yes.” Hannah nodded once. “Yes, I will.”
A door slammed nearby. Then another.
I looked across the street.
Two more men in overalls had appeared. They were a few houses down to the east, the direction we’d been headed. One was carrying a baseball bat, the other a garden hoe. They were out of earshot, but not by much.
Tears filled Joshua’s eyes. “Thank you.”
“She’s at the compound, right?” Hannah kept her voice low.
The guys with the baseball bat and the garden hoe marched across their yards and took up position in the street toward the east end of the block. The man who lived next door to Joshua stood at the west end.
Joshua nodded. Then he raised the weapon, aiming in our general direction. He shouted, “I told you to get out of here.”
“We’re leaving.” I grabbed Hannah’s arm again, pulled her away.
This time she let me drag her toward the east end of the block.
The two men from across the street stood in the middle of the road, holding their respective weapons, trying to look tough. The guy on the left was missing an ear. The one on the right had his nose damaged in a similar way to the woman.
Hannah and I walked shoulder to shoulder between them.
Up close I could see they were dirty and malnourished. When we were a few feet past them, I stopped and turned around.
“How long has it been since either of you has eaten?” I asked.
No answer. Just sullen looks.
I pulled out my wallet and grabbed two twenties. “How about dinner on me?”
The men stared at the cash like it was a gold doubloon being offered by Lucifer himself. They wanted it; I could see that in their eyes. But they were afraid.
“There’re no strings attached.” I held out the money.
Neither man made any move to take it. After a moment, I folded the bills several times and placed them on the surface of the street.
The man with only one ear raised his garden hoe. “Be gone, evil one.”
I pulled Hannah toward the end of the block as the two men watched us go.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE
Nine Months Ago
Belief is a strange animal. It makes people do things that are contrary to common sense, against the laws of nature.
Take, for example, my father-in-law, whose unshakable conviction that he was in charge of his own destiny, the master of his fate, led us all to the brink of destruction.
Some of us fell over the brink; the ones who survived were never the same.
The part that bothers me to this day was that our salvation lay in my hands, and I didn’t even realize it.
I was weak. I chose a twisted version of familial duty over what was right. I think about that decision often, usually when the rocking of the bus makes reading hard, and I wonder what I would have done differently.
Would I have even been capable of choosing a different path?
My father-in-law’s office was in a skyscraper in downtown Dallas, the fiftieth floor. The building was a monolithic shaft of glass, dark gray, located a few blocks from where Kennedy was killed.
The office was large and expensively decorated, as befitting a man of Frank’s stature in the financial community. A desk the size of a Cadillac dominated one half of the room. The other half contained a sitting area, two leather couches bracketing a glass coffee table.
I stared out the window at the hazy wonder that was Dallas, a testament to commerce in action and powerful men who believed in building things using only their own daring ingenuity and mortgages with favorable loan terms.
A mahogany bookcase covered one wall, the shelves filled with leather-bound volumes that had never been read and framed pictures of Frank with various notables—governors and billionaires, several former presidents, more than a few film stars.
The largest photo, however, was a candid shot of the family—my wife and me, with both her parents and our two children, taken two years before at Frank’s country club.
The other wall contained two items: a television tuned to a financial network and a bar.
Frank stood at the bar, a highball glass in hand, pouring himself a generous measure of vodka over a pair of ice cubes.
It was eleven in the morning.
I turned away from the window. “Why’d you call me?”
“How are my grandkids?” Frank drained half the drink like it was milk. “School OK?”
After a moment, I nodded. Both children were in private school, the tuition paid for by a trust Frank had established in their names.
“What was so urgent?” I said.
“You remember the guys I asked you about last year?”
“The Frisella brothers. You wanted to give them a real-estate loan.”
He nodded. “You have a good memory.”
The Frisella brothers were twins, originally from a small town in East Texas, not far from Shreveport, Louisiana. From a young age, the brothers had a burning desire to make their mark in the world, and they understood that ambitions such as they possessed could never be realized so far behind the Pine Curtain.
So they moved to Dallas while in their twenties. The move occurred, coincidentally, just as an investigation into the suspicious death of a pimp who owed the brothers money was heating up.
Now
, two decades later, the Frisellas owned a large portfolio of shopping centers and office buildings. The shopping centers usually had as tenants one or more brothels masquerading as nail salons. The brothers were also silent partners in a half dozen used-car lots that laundered money for the South Louisiana mob and a chain of strip clubs that offered specials on lap dances and blow jobs every other Sunday.
“Do you remember what I told you?” I said. “About not getting in bed with them?”
“Arlo Baines and his self-righteousness.” Frank drained the glass. “Were you born this smug or did you get sanctimonious working as a cop?”
We were silent for a moment, eyeing each other. I realized he’d probably had more than one drink already.
He rattled the ice cubes in his highball and looked away. He poured another inch of vodka and took a long sip.
“What’s wrong, Frank?” I adjusted my gun belt and sat on one of the couches.
“The Frisellas won’t make their payments.”
His words hung in the air like cigarette smoke in a cancer ward.
The worst thing you could do in my father-in-law’s universe was to not keep current with your loan. The structure of his very existence depended on borrowers making regular payments according to the terms of their mortgages.
To not pay was a grave sin, a heinous crime, akin to child molestation or voting for a socialist. The very notion was absurd.
Frank had the persona of a kindly uncle until someone failed to honor the terms of his loan. Then he became ruthless and cold, a shark going after a wounded swimmer. His weapons were made from paper but deadly in their own fashion—demand letters and default notices, foreclosure suits, everything administered with ruthless efficiency by his soldiers, a phalanx of high-priced attorneys.
The borrower’s circumstances didn’t matter. A sick child, a sudden illness, a contract that didn’t make it in time. Nothing counted with Frank except getting paid.
This MO worked with 99 percent of his customers. Unfortunately, the Frisella brothers fell into that murky 1 percent.
I glanced at my watch. “I have to get back to work.”
“I don’t think you’re understanding the gravity of the situation.” Frank sat on the other sofa. “These are not exactly the kind of people who respond well when lawyers get involved.”
I thought about all the things I could say, but I didn’t want to be one of those I-told-you-so people or be accused again of being self-righteous. So I said, “It’s one loan. Maybe you should just write it off and count your blessings.”
He drained his glass of vodka. His face was so pale, I worried that he was about to have a heart attack.
After a few moments, he said, “It’s not just one loan.”
I sighed and rubbed my eyes.
“The bank’s ratios are off,” he said. “Way off.”
“What does that mean, Frank?”
He stared at me like I was slow in the head. “The FDIC auditors, they conducted a random review of our books last week. They saw the numbers . . . the ratios.”
I stared at him but didn’t speak. My cell phone rang, and my boss’s number flashed on the screen. I ignored the call, muted the ringer.
“Effing bean counters.” He shook his head, an angry expression on his face. “Banks are supposed to make loans, right?”
Frank was a deacon at the North Dallas Baptist Church. He didn’t believe in swearing, especially the F-word. Vodka in the morning, beer on the golf course, loans to East Texas mobsters—those were different matters.
“Too much debt on the books,” he said. “Our loan-to-deposit ratio is too high.”
I waited. There was more to come; I could tell by the look on his face.
“Too much bad debt.” He spoke the last so softly I had to strain to hear the words.
He told me the rest of it, how the actual numbers were worse than what the FDIC auditors had seen. Something about certain figures on the bank’s balance sheet being misreported to the feds over the last two quarters. How Frank’s personal attorney said he should start calling the erroneous numbers a “clerical error” because there was now talk of a criminal investigation.
The kicker was that even with the misreported numbers being in the bank’s favor, the ratio of bad loans to assets was at a critical point, almost to a level that would trigger a federal takeover of the bank. The tipping point would occur next week, when the Frisellas missed their third payment in a row and their loan was declared in default.
“They have to pay up.” He stared at the floor. “If they don’t, everything is gone.”
I was unsure of what to do or how to respond. I said as much, not adding what I really thought—You’ve made a bed of thorns and now you’re going to have to sleep in it.
“My daughter, the mother of your children.” He wiped tears from his eyes. “What do you think it will do to her to see me in prison?”
I stood and walked to the window. The city glistened in the sunlight, ten thousand shards of broken glass.
“The Frisella brothers,” he said. “Make them pay me. Please.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FOUR
Hannah and I made it to her rental car two streets over without incident.
The houses were nicer in this area of town. Not bigger but more well kept. Lawns instead of dirt. Paint jobs less than a decade old. Cars that looked functional.
On the horizon, the storm clouds had grown larger, another summer squall developing like yesterday’s.
I got in the passenger side of the Prius and hoped there wouldn’t be tornadoes. I didn’t think Piedra Springs would fare very well with two strikes in two days.
Hannah slid behind the wheel. She started the vehicle and turned on the AC.
“Why is everybody so skinny?” I asked.
“They’ve all been kicked out for various reasons. They give everything they make to the church in order to buy their way back in.”
I pondered the intricacies of the human mind.
People starving in a land of plenty. Emaciated of their own accord. So enamored with a belief system that didn’t make sense, they were willing to die to regain their status.
Anorexia of the soul.
“Any government assistance they get,” Hannah said, “food stamps, whatever, that goes to the church, too.”
We were silent for a moment.
“Where is this compound, anyway?” I asked.
“This is my fight. I’ll take you back to the motel.” She put her hand on the gearshift.
I grasped her fingers, gently pulled them away from the knob.
“The girl I saw was shaping up to be a beauty. I’d hate to think of what might happen if no one’s looking out for her.”
“Do you have kids?” Hannah asked.
A moment passed. The sun was still shining, but thunder cracked in the distance, and the leaves on the trees had swung upward, indicating a shift in wind patterns. The storm was getting closer.
“I did.”
She had the courtesy not to ask more questions. She looked behind us, in the direction of the block full of skinny apostates.
“How old is your niece?” I asked.
“Jenny just turned thirteen.”
I didn’t say anything.
Hannah continued to stare behind us, though there was nothing to see.
“I tried to warn my sister about the Sky of Zion. But she always saw the good in every situation.”
“Joshua is her husband?” I asked. “Jenny’s father? And that little boy’s?”
Hannah nodded. “My sister wanted only one child, but the church elders said women should be fruitful.”
Of course
they did. Followers who have been recruited from the general public are more likely to question the theology. Better to raise your own.
“So where’s the compound?”
“South of here. Maybe thirty miles as the crow flies.”
I remembered the map I’d seen on the Internet. “The old prison.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“A fortress.”
She nodded.
I pulled the slip of paper with Boone’s information from my pocket. Entered the address into the Prius’s GPS system. “This guy seems to know a lot about what goes on around town,” I said. “I want to talk to him before we head south.”
“You’re planning to just go to the compound?” She sounded incredulous.
“Seems like a good place to start. Maybe Molly’s children made it back there somehow. Seems pretty certain your niece is there, too.”
She didn’t reply. The sky darkened. A cloud of dust blew past the front window.
“How many other girls do you think are at that place, on their own?” I said.
“They’ll see us coming from a mile away. We’ll be sitting ducks.”
Silas McPherson, the guy in the black Bentley, had given me a business card. The address was not far from the old prison. I wondered what his connection might be to the Sky of Zion. He’d certainly been interested in the site of Molly’s murder.
Hannah put the car in drive. The engine was eerily quiet.
Two minutes later, we stopped in front of Boone’s house, a large, two-story brick home in what passed for the upscale part of Piedra Springs.
For some reason, I wasn’t surprised by what I found there.
I pointed to a spot in the circular driveway. “Park behind that black Bentley.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE
On a block full of big, old homes, Boone’s place appeared to be the biggest and the oldest, certainly the most impressive.
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