Cult Following

by Donn Cortez

  He pulled up in the Hummer outside a small farmhouse. Murayaki was waiting for him on the screened-in porch, sitting on an old-fashioned porch glider and drinking from a bottle of water. She was dressed much more casually from the last time he’d seen her, in loose-fitting jeans and a white hooded sweatshirt with UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO printed on it. Her long black hair was pulled back in a ponytail.

  He got out of his vehicle, walked up the front steps and opened the creaking screen door. “Ms. Murayaki,” he said. “Thank you for seeing me. Am I interrupting something?”

  “You mean, do I have some raving cult member inside, strapped to a chair while we attempt to un-brainwash him?” she asked. “Thereby putting you in an extremely untenable situation vis-à-vis legal responsibility?”

  He smiled and put his hands on his hips. “Well, now that you bring it up…”

  She smiled back. “Don’t worry—we rarely do that anymore, except in cases of court-ordered intercessions or legal guardians interceding with minors. The big cults can afford more lawyers than we can, and they’ve been grinding away at us for years.”

  “So why the remote location?”

  “This is where his parents live,” she said. “Not everyone can afford a condo in Miami Beach.” She motioned for Horatio to sit and he did so, easing himself down on the glider and feeling it move beneath him like an animal adjusting to his weight.

  “I would have come in to the city to see you, but I’m at a sensitive stage in the process,” she said. “It’s important to establish a bond of trust, and that means staying close during the intervention.”

  “For how long?”

  “The average is about four days, depending. The longer the subject’s been in, the harder it can be—after a certain point they’re not just leaving the cult, they’re leaving friends, lovers, sometimes even children.”

  “So what do you do? Or would that be giving away trade secrets?”

  She leaned back, the motion making the glider move ever so slightly. “There’s nothing mysterious about it, really. The one thing all cults try to take away from the individual is the capacity for critical thought; I just give it back to them.”

  “As easy as that? After all, you can lead a horse to water—”

  “—but you can’t make him think? Well, fortunately most of my subjects are more intelligent than your average horse—they just need to be reminded. That’s really what I do; I teach people how to think for themselves again.”

  “In four days.”

  She shrugged. “So I like a challenge.”

  Horatio leaned forward, clasped his hands together in front of him, elbows on his knees. “I notice you’re not being that forthcoming with details.”

  She glanced at him sharply, then sighed. “Look, all I do is present the subject with information. That’s it. There are interventionists who club the subject over the head with evangelism, but most of us rely on objectivity and honesty as opposed to dogma. Besides, any argument based on religious grounds always boils down to one belief system against another anyway, with no real proof involved. I like to have reason on my side; nothing makes a better weapon in a debate than a good hard fact.”

  “It sounds,” Horatio said mildly, “as if the police aren’t the only ones you have an adversarial relationship with.”

  “People don’t hire me to hold their child’s hand,” she said. She put her bottle down on the arm of the glider. “You know what I really am? I’m an assassin. The cult imposes a new persona on top of an old one—even gives it a new name—and that persona is no more than a big, bloodsucking leech. It’s a parasite that exists to suck money out of the community, work without questioning or complaining, and attract more victims. The longer it’s in place, the weaker the original personality becomes. It’s my job to kill that leech, and yeah, I get a lot of satisfaction out of that.”

  Her voice sounded steady, but Horatio could feel her body trembling through the glider, both hands locked tight around the edge of the bench, down by her legs. “It’s always the same at the beginning,” she said, her voice low and intense. “They’re like cows, dumb and stubborn and slow, and for every question you ask you get a rote answer. You have to find a crack, an opening, something you can get your fingers into and pry.”

  “Ever push someone too far?”

  “That’s not a relevant question. By definition, I push every single one of them too far.”

  “So you’ve never had a subject do something extreme in response?”

  “Like what—attack me physically?”

  “I was thinking more in terms of trying to harm themselves,” Horatio said.

  She frowned. “Only once. Tough case, I should have taken better precautions. But it was early in my career, and I didn’t fully understand what I was getting into yet.”

  “What do you mean? I thought you used to be a cult recruiter yourself.”

  She sighed and leaned back. “Yeah, and when I reversed direction I went as far as I could go the other way. Nobody hates smoking more than an ex-smoker, you know? So my attitude in those days was rabidly anticult.”

  “As opposed to how kindly disposed you are these days?”

  “Oh, I used to be much worse. So much so that it clouded my judgment.” She grabbed her water bottle, took a long sip of water. “What I couldn’t see—what I refused to see—was that for some people, the cult was better for them than what they’d left behind.”

  Horatio’s eyebrows went up. “That seems hard to believe.”

  “I’m not saying that joining a cult is a good choice,” she added quickly. “It never is. But when you take a person out of a carefully controlled environment, they have to have someplace else to go. Otherwise, all you have is a puppet with the strings cut.”

  Horatio thought about that. The people at the Vitality Method—did they have someplace better to go?

  Of course they do. They have friends, families; Sinhurma didn’t recruit from the streets, he targeted people with money.

  It wasn’t that they had no place better to go—it was that Sinhurma’s patients thought they’d already arrived. The compound was the doctor’s little enclosed utopia, a place of manufactured beauty, youth and joy. So if the Vitality Method is the Promised Land, where have they gone from there?

  “See,” Murayaki continued, “most cultists, contrary to popular belief, aren’t running from shattered homes or child abuse. They’re usually well-off and well-educated. But every so often there’s an exception….”

  “Which you ran into.”

  She was silent for a moment, lost in thought. Then, “Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t like the cult rescued him; they don’t care about anything but the survival of the group. But this guy…he was mentally challenged. No family, no friends, barely getting by on a disability pension. The cult adopted him the way you’d adopt a puppy, except they found a way to capitalize on it. He was great for fund-raising, great for showing people how caring and trustworthy they were.”

  “And when there was nobody to perform for?”

  She gave a bitter little laugh. “Oh, you mean when they beat him and kept him locked in a cage and fed him nothing but scraps? I wish it was that simple. No, he was probably treated better than anyone else in the cult—they didn’t have to starve or brainwash him to get obedience. All they had to give him was some attention, and he’d do anything they said. Yeah, he was being used, but he was happier than he’d ever been in his life.”

  “And you took all that away.”

  “Yeah,” she said quietly. “I did. I tried to show him where all the money was going, but that was too complicated. So I had ex–cult members talk to him, showed him tapes of breaking sessions. What finally got to him was when he understood they were portraying him as an idiot in order to turn a profit. It was a hard idea to get across, but I did it. I hammered at him with the truth until I finally broke through that thick goddamn skull.”

  She sounded even angrier than she had before. Horatio waited. />
  “He cried for a day. A full day. Then he broke a glass and tried to cut his wrists.”

  “But he didn’t succeed.”

  “No. I got him patched up and into counseling. I didn’t even have a paying client—like I said, he had no family or friends—so I paid for that out of my own pocket. And then he went back to his tiny little apartment and his tiny little life.”

  “If no one paid you to deprogram him,” Horatio asked, “then why did you take him on in the first place?”

  She gave him a bleak look. “I thought he’d be a challenge. And I was right—I just didn’t understand what kind.”

  Horatio studied her. “And how’s he doing now?”

  “What makes you think I know?” she asked neutrally.

  “Let’s just say I have a hunch.”

  Her expression softened. “He’s doing all right, I guess. He likes to play checkers.”

  “How often do you visit him?”

  She hesitated, then said, “Every Thursday.”

  “Then he still has at least one friend, right?”

  “For what it’s worth.” Her eyes narrowed. “But you didn’t come all the way down here to talk about my bad choices.” Suddenly she was all business, with almost no transition. “You said you might have a cult gearing up for a mass suicide?”

  “I might.” He told her about Sinhurma, about how he had confronted him and the deserted clinic. He didn’t go into detail about the homicide investigation, but told her Sinhurma and his people were prime suspects.

  “I see,” she said thoughtfully. “And you have no idea where they went?”

  “I have people working on that. What I’d like from you is some idea of what to expect when I find them.”

  “Hard to say. Paranoia is more or less a given when it comes to cult leaders, but that doesn’t mean he’s planning on suiciding. Pushing him like you did was almost guaranteed to get a response, but I don’t think this was the one you wanted.”

  “Not exactly.”

  She shrugged. “On the other hand, sometimes the only way to get through to someone is to get in their face. Before you can start a dialogue, you have to get their attention, and it sounds like you did that.”

  “Hard to have a dialogue when the other person disappears, though,” Horatio said.

  “You know what that tells me? He’s worried. You’re not wrong about the size of this guy’s ego, and if he’s got the connections you say, he should have gone on the offensive. Called in some favors, cried religious persecution, that sort of thing. The fact that he didn’t stand his ground means one of three things.”

  “Which are?”

  She held up a finger. “First, that he’s messing with you. Possible—screwing with people’s heads is what he does, after all—but unlikely. It takes time and preparation to make a group disappear, and reactionary tactics are usually more spontaneous.”

  She uncurled a second finger. “Two, that you really got to him and he’s just on the run. Again, having a group with him slows him down and makes it hard to vanish—if he really wanted to be gone, he’d probably just hop on a plane by himself, take an extended vacation in a country without extradition.”

  She added a third finger. “And three, that he’s gone to ground someplace isolated. Cults often own property in remote locations—they’re easy to fortify, which lets them control people’s entering and leaving.”

  “So he’s just relocated?”

  She shook her head. “Not that simple. The vanishing act suggests he had an exit strategy already in place, maybe even something they rehearsed over and over. That indicates a dangerous frame of mind.”

  “Dangerous how?”

  “Jim Jones had his people run mock-suicide drills several times before the real thing. At first, all they drank was Kool-Aid….”

  “And then,” Horatio said, “something a little more final.”

  “It may come to that, yes.”

  “There’s something else,” Horatio said. “I have reason to believe that one of the members is a recent convert—in fact, that he was recruited specifically for his role in a crime. Is there any advice you can give me on how to reach out to him? Is there any particular approach I should make or avoid?”

  “Well, some people feel that trying to intervene with a new cult member is actually more dangerous—they call it the honeymoon phase, when the recruit is still feeling the initial euphoria. I don’t agree, though—the longer someone’s in a cult, the more likely they are to form long-lasting cult relationships, to become dependent on the cult, to distance themselves from their previous existence. If you have the chance to communicate with this person, honesty is your best weapon. Don’t try to mislead him or hold anything back—just give him the truth. No matter how much he refuses to accept it at first, some part of him will recognize it.”

  “No matter how painful it is?”

  She took another sip of water. “Yeah. People need the truth. Sometimes, I think that’s the only reason any of them wind up listening to me at all—that after all the sweet lies their leaders feed them, they have this craving for a grain of salt.”

  She glanced at her watch. “Look, I have to get back inside. But—well, just hang on a second. I’ll be right back.”

  Horatio stood up with her. She ducked inside the house, then returned a moment later with a DVD case in her hand. She handed it to him and said, “I’m sure you can understand why I can’t let you watch an actual session, but I’ve recorded some in the past—clients often want to see just what they’re getting into when they hire me to counsel their son or daughter. This’ll give you some ideas of the techniques I use—maybe they’ll come in handy.”

  “Thank you,” Horatio said. “And good luck.”

  “Same to you…”

  Despite being the CSI team’s scuba diver, Eric Delko’s preferred method of exercise was running. He tried to get in at least an hour a day, usually early in the morning; though Miami tended to be better known for its sunsets, its sunrises could be pretty too. It made him a member of a particular tribe, the predawn joggers: there were a whole group of people he never saw in anything but shorts, T-shirts and sneakers. It wasn’t always that social a tribe—breath was often too valuable to be wasted on conversation, and most people liked to run listening to music through headphones or earplugs—so most communication between tribe members took the form of waves, smiles and nods.

  The residents of the Vitality Method compound had taken the idea of exercise as a bonding ritual a lot more seriously. Delko knew that Japanese corporations often started their day with communal calisthenics, but he found the whole idea disturbing; one of the reasons he ran was the feeling of freedom, and one of the reasons he ran early in the morning was the isolation. A nod from an iPod-wearing stranger as they passed each other was all the interaction he wanted at 5 A.M.

  Still, a group that did everything together multiplied the chances of one of them leaving some sort of trace of where they’d been. Delko was hoping the grounds of the compound would prove more informative than the main building had.

  The swimming pool and the changing rooms next to it yielded nothing of interest. The same went for the archery range and the auditorium.

  Then he found the gardening shed.

  He almost didn’t recognize it as such, because it was completely empty—only a bit of spilled fertilizer and the empty hooks on the walls betrayed its purpose. He stepped inside and realized it had stored more than just gardening implements—from the hooks on the walls, it had held hammers and saws and various other tools. None were there now.

  He took pictures of every surface, trying to figure out what was missing. He found several tire tracks in the spilled fertilizer and in the dirt by the front door; he deduced that the wheels had rolled through the fertilizer first, then deposited bits of it along the tires’ path as they rolled out the door. From the way the tracks crisscrossed each other, it looked like several one-wheeled objects.

  Wheelbarrows,
he thought.

  Behind the shed was another interesting find—several depressions in the earth, the grass in those areas crushed and yellow. Something heavy had rested there recently, and from the shape of the depressions Delko thought it was probably several wooden pallets.

  They had confiscated the clinic’s vehicles, but obviously Sinhurma had access to more; Delko found fresh tire tracks next to the depressions in the earth as well. From the size, tread and wheelbase it was a large vehicle, probably an SUV or truck.

  So something had been loaded up and taken away. Something they needed tools for?

  The ground around the depressions told the story—a scattering of sawdust and a few small splinters meant the cargo had to be lumber. They’re building something—but what?

  He thought about it as he headed back toward the lab, then decided to take a brief detour to grab a bite to eat.

  Horatio watched the disk in the computer lab. The screen showed him a logo of the company, the Mental Freedom Foundation, then cut to a shot of Sun-Li Murayaki herself. She wore a business jacket over a fuzzy white top, and perched casually on the corner of her desk—trying to project professionalism and warmth at the same time, Horatio thought.

  “Hello,” she said. “What you’re about to see is typical of the interventions I conduct. The subject is free to leave at any time; the reason he doesn’t is because he has something to prove. Luckily for him, I have more proof than he does.”

  The camera cut to a static shot of a living room. Fireplace in the background, brown leather sofa and matching overstuffed chairs, big pink ceramic vase stuffed with flowers on a small table of dark, highly polished wood. Lots of natural light.

  Sun-Li sat on the sofa, dressed in black track pants and a gray sweatshirt. Across from her, on one of the chairs, sat a young man with a shaved head, wearing a shapeless white garment somewhere between a toga and a smock.

  “So, Brad—I understand that your leader, Reverend Joshua, is an honest man,” Sun-Li said. She sounded casual, relaxed.