Cult Following

by Donn Cortez

  “Of course he is,” Brad said. He sounded calm, almost sleepy. “He believes in The Truth. And my name is Abraham now.”

  Sun-Li picked up a thick folder from beside her on the couch, flipped it open and pulled out a newspaper clipping. “Then how do you explain this?” she said, holding it out to him.

  The recording wasn’t nearly as dramatic as Horatio had expected. There were no large bodyguards preventing Brad from leaving, no shouting, no tears. Brad was given a lot of information to process, in the form of news reports, government documents, videotapes and even police reports. For every question he had, Sun-Li had an answer. She refused to be drawn into metaphysical arguments, always returning the discussion to the provable facts. Brad’s parents made several appearances, usually to bring him food—food rich in protein, Horatio noted. When Brad complained about feeling overwhelmed, they suggested he take a nap. The recording stopped, then resumed again sometime later.

  It had no dramatic finale, either; Brad didn’t suddenly see the error of his ways, or break down in tears and embrace his parents. Instead, the tone of his questions changed—they became less about challenging Sun-Li and more about genuine requests for information. By the end of the recording, Brad was obviously deeply unsettled; Horatio could almost see the neurons starting to fire again.

  The last shot was of Sun-Li, in her office again. “This process took place over five days, slightly longer than average. Brad continued to talk to his parents, agreed to attend group sessions, and eventually left the cult. It’s been estimated that recovery times for such an experience range from six to eighteen months, but it can take much longer. It’s a slow process…but once they begin to think for themselves again, they don’t want to stop.”

  The camera moved in, ever so slightly, on her face. “Just make sure,” she said, “that they don’t have a reason to.”

  “Amen,” Horatio said.

  Yelina walked in on Horatio in the layout room, staring at the objects on the light table: a bloodstained blue T-shirt, a pair of shorts, socks and underwear, a pair of sneakers. Ruth Carrell’s clothing.

  “We’ll find them, Horatio,” she said.

  “Of that,” he said, “I have no doubt. The question is—before or after?”

  “There may not even be an ‘after,’ ” she pointed out.

  “I wish I could believe that….”

  “Any luck with the drug connection?”

  “Afraid not. Calleigh’s questioned all the principals and none of them implicated the clinic or Sinhurma.”

  “You think they’re covering for him?”

  Horatio selected a slide and put it under the microscope. “If they are, there’s no reason I can see. They’re not cult members—and despite Sinhurma’s delusions of grandeur, he doesn’t have the kind of rep that would keep them quiet out of fear. No, I think we just kicked over enough rocks that something else crawled out.”

  Yelina yawned. “Excuse me—it’s been a long day. So, any other developments?”

  Horatio peered into the eyepiece, adjusted the focus. “There just might be….”

  “What are you looking at?”

  “Grains of sand I found in Ruth Carrell’s shoe. If I can identify them, they might tell us where Sinhurma’s gone.”

  “Good luck. I’ll let you know if anything turns up on the street.”

  Normally, the TV hanging from one corner of Auntie Bellum’s ceiling didn’t get a lot of Delko’s attention unless it was flashing sports scores; today, though, as he was about to dig into a bowl of jambalaya, he heard the phrase “Miami-Dade crime lab” and glanced up.

  The face he saw on the fuzzy color screen was vaguely familiar, in the way that veteran character actors on television always were. It’s that guy, Delko thought. The one that played that jerk on Seinfeld, and the weirdo on Friends. Or was it Everbody Loves Raymond? He couldn’t remember the man’s name, but it didn’t matter—he always played the same role anyway, the instantly unlikeable guy who sneered, glared and whined his way from one commercial break to the next as a succession of dishonest car salesmen, grouchy principals and bad blind dates.

  Not a good choice for a spokesman, Delko thought, though the man didn’t seem nearly as reprehensible at the moment. Whatever his career choices, the actor was plainly upset about something, and Delko wasn’t surprised to learn that something was the closure of the Vitality Method clinic. When he asked the waitress to turn up the sound, she had to stand on a chair to do so; either they’d lost the remote or the set was so old it never had one.

  “—really don’t understand what the problem is,” the actor said. “I’ve been attending Doctor Sinhurma’s sessions for six weeks now, and I think they’re fantastic. I’ve never felt better in my life.”

  I’ll bet you haven’t, Delko thought.

  “I got an e-mail from the clinic canceling my appointment without any explanation, and when I tried to drive up here the police wouldn’t let me in. I don’t know what’s going on.”

  The reporter’s voice cut in as the camera panned over the front gates of the clinic and the two squad cars parked in front of them. “Phone calls to the clinic went unanswered, and a police representative who declined to be interviewed on camera simply stated that the Vitality Method was part of an ongoing investigation.”

  “Well, that didn’t take long,” Delko sighed. He tossed some money on the counter and left without touching his food—he had to get back to work, and he didn’t have time to get it to go.

  You can’t bring food into the lab anyway, he thought as he crossed the street. Somebody should tell that actor to forget about the Vitality Method and try the CSI diet instead….

  Delko found Horatio in the lab, going over the evidence they’d collected from The Earthly Garden. “Hey, H,” he said. He gave him a quick summary of what he’d found at the compound and then told him about the news story.

  “Now the media will be all over it,” Horatio said. “And it’s only going to get worse. Well, we have other things to worry about.”

  He studied the plug of the burned-out blender Delko had found in a Dumpster. “Ruth told me they were planning on expanding, but she didn’t mention another site. I found sand in her shoe, and Trace is trying to identify plant matter from the sole; hopefully that’ll give us a location as well.”

  “That why you’re checking the restaurant stuff again? Think it’ll point us in the direction they’ve gone?”

  “I already know that,” Horatio said. “They’re headed straight for crazy…no, I thought I’d take another crack at matching the pattern you found burned into this plug.”

  “I thought for sure it was one of the knives,” Delko said. “But the pattern’s too squared off and thin.”

  “Yes, it is,” Horatio said. “On the exposed end, anyway.” He picked up one of the charred knives by the blade, then took hold of the wooden handle with his other hand. He tried to pull them apart, with no success.

  The second knife, though, pulled apart easily. The base of the blade was thin and squared off.

  “Is that what I think it is?” Delko said, pointing to the exposed metal.

  Horatio examined it critically. “Only one way to find out,” he said.

  “The Garden of Eden,” Wolfe said out loud.

  “Excuse me?” Calleigh said.

  Wolfe glanced over from the screen he’d been studying intently. “Sorry, didn’t notice you there,” he said.

  “Would it help if I was wearing a snake and offered you an apple?”

  “Huh? Oh, right. No, I mean Sinhurma has this Garden of Eden fixation. It didn’t really register when I scanned the site before—there’s so much pontificating and so few facts I sort of classified it as noise, not signal. But I’ve been studying his Web site, and he refers to it in one way or another over and over.”

  “Well, it’s a story that features religion and food,” Calleigh said. “That would seem to be right in the doctor’s comfort zone.”

  “More lik
e his obsession zone. If I’m interpreting this right, he thinks the apple doesn’t just symbolize original sin, or even self-awareness; he thinks it’s a literal representation of how evil enters the body.”

  “Through fruit?”

  “Through eating. Certain foods are more evil than others, and preparing foods in certain ways can increase or reduce how evil they are…it gets pretty twisted. But that’s not the important part.”

  He tapped a few keys. Calleigh came over and studied the screen from behind his shoulder.

  “This passage, right here,” Wolfe said.

  “ ‘For the Garden is still within our reach,’ ” she read. “ ‘It still exists, not just in our hearts but on this Earth, as well. It has been waiting for us to reclaim it, to return to the bosom of its embrace as a child returns to its mother.’ Sounds like he has someplace specific in mind.”

  “That’s what I was thinking. Later on, he refers to a ‘lush and verdant paradise, where the promise of Eternal Youth becomes a legend fulfilled.’ ”

  “Wait a second,” Calleigh said. “That sounds familiar.”

  “Sure it does,” Wolfe said. “Substitute the word ‘fountain’ for ‘promise’…”

  “—and it’s a reference to Ponce de León,” Calleigh finished. “The ‘legend fulfilled’ becomes the Fountain of Youth. Which is supposedly located—”

  “—somewhere in the Everglades,” Wolfe said. “He thinks the ‘glades are the Garden of Eden. That’s where he’s gone.”

  “Well, that only give us four thousand square miles to search,” Calleigh sighed. “He’s somewhere in the River of Grass—but where?”

  “Cape Sable,” Horatio said.

  He’d called a meeting in the lab’s conference room, all of them clustered at one end of a big wooden table. “The plant material found in the tread of Ruth Carrell’s shoe was Chamaesyce garberi,” Horatio said. He rubbed his eyes wearily. “Also known as Garber’s spurge. It’s on the federal list of endangered species—only five sites in Florida where it grows. One’s Big Pine Key, the other four are in the ’glades.”

  “How do you know which one it is?” Calleigh asked.

  “Garber’s spurge grows in pine rocklands, coastal flats, coastal grasslands, and on beach ridges, either on exposed limestone or in Pamlico sand. I found Pamlico sand in her shoes—and Cape Sable has plenty of that.” Pamlico sand was composed of sand, limestone and tiny, carbonaceous fossils called eolianites from the late Pleistocene; it underlay much of Florida and surfaced at certain points.

  “Cape Sable’s also on Ponce de León Bay,” Calleigh pointed out.

  “What are they doing out there?” said Wolfe.

  “Carpentry, apparently,” Delko answered. “I found traces of a large amount of lumber that had been stored at the compound, and all their tools were gone.”

  “Maybe they’re building an ark?” Calleigh said.

  All heads at the table swiveled to look at her. She shrugged and smiled. “Religious cult, woodworking, lots of coastline? Makes as much sense as anything else.”

  “Maybe we should put out a security alert for the Miami Zoo,” Delko said with a grin.

  “I don’t think so,” Wolfe said. “Sinhurma’s obsession is with the Garden of Eden, not Noah. If there’s a religious script he’s following, it’s Genesis, not…whatever the story of Noah’s ark was in.”

  “That would be…still Genesis,” Calleigh said.

  “As long as it’s not Revelations,” Horatio said. “If he wants to run around naked in the swamp and pretend he’s Adam, fine. But he’s not alone out there…and I’m not going to let him sacrifice anybody else.”

  13

  CAPE SABLE WAS AT THE SOUTHERN tip of Florida, on the west coast of the Everglades. It had several beaches along its length that were open to camping, but most of the Cape was a mangrove swamp inhabited only by wildlife.

  Horatio considered several approaches. He could go in by sea, but that would give the members of the cult plenty of time to see them coming. He decided instead to travel overland as far as possible, then go the rest of the way by airboat.

  He told Delko, Wolfe and Calleigh to get ready. He wanted his whole team with him, for two reasons: first, because they had all worked on the case—and second, because there might be as many as two dozen bodies to process.

  “You mind if I stay behind, Horatio?” Calleigh asked.

  “What’s up?” Horatio asked. “You have enough of the Great Outdoors after your tree-climbing adventure?”

  “It’s not that,” she said. “But I have an idea I’d like to follow up on in the lab.”

  “Sure. We’ll be fine.”

  They took three airboats on trailers and a SWAT team. Horatio, Delko and Wolfe traveled in the Hummer, while two other police vehicles followed them.

  “What do you think we’re going to find, H?” Delko asked. He was in the front seat, Wolfe in the back.

  “If we’re lucky,” Horatio said, putting the Hummer in gear, “two dozen extremely fit people, covered in mosquito bites.”

  “And if not?” Wolfe asked.

  “Same number of people,” Horatio replied, “but more bugs…”

  Calleigh Duquesne was not the sort of woman to give up easily.

  Not being able to link the arrow that killed Ruth Carrell to the arrows recovered from Julio Ferra’s garage still bothered her. Despite nailing Charlessly and shutting down his drug operation, she couldn’t ignore the fact that it had still been a lead that turned into a dead end.

  Sometimes, though, following a trail that didn’t go where you wanted still took you somewhere interesting. Perched in a tree, waiting for a homicidal maniac to climb down from his deer blind and come looking for her, she’d found herself thinking about Julio Ferra. According to Horatio, he’d learned to shoot a bow from his father; they’d gone on hunting trips together. She’d wondered who had hand-fletched the arrows, the father or the son—it was the kind of thing you’d show your child how to do, the kind of thing you’d keep later.

  The arrows she’d examined from Ferra’s garage hadn’t been new. They were worn, dusty, their paint starting to peel. The heads had been glued on, not screwed on like more modern arrows. The evidence told her they were probably made in the late eighties or early nineties, and she was willing to bet the feathers were a product of one of those father/son hunting trips. If they’d stuck close to home, it also meant the feathers were almost certainly from a Floridian bird.

  That had given her an idea, but right about then Dooley had shown up with an extremely large gun in one hand, and she’d been a little busy for the next while.

  Now, though—now she had time to see if she was right.

  She clipped a tiny sample from the quills of the killer arrow, then did the same with one of the Ferra arrows.

  “All right, guys,” she murmured. “Incredible Hulk time…”

  Airboats were noisy. Flat-bottomed skiffs with large, caged props at the back, they were essentially surfboards with an oversized fan bolted on. They were perfect for skimming along the shallow, marshy water of the Everglades, where something with a deeper keel or standard outboard motor would get stuck, but they made a racket reminiscent of a mosquito the size of a Cessna.

  This was why Horatio had them shut off the engines while still a mile away, and pole the remaining distance. He sat in the front with a GPS locator in his hand, making sure they were still on course while Wolfe and Delko provided the muscle power. The SWAT team in the other two boats glided along behind them, half a dozen muscular men in short-sleeved shirts and bulletproof vests, dark blue ball caps shading the sun from their eyes. Not that there was much sun to be protected from; the black thunderheads rolling overhead promised a downpour, and soon. The air held the heavy, thick stillness that preceded a major storm, and the combination of physical activity and humidity had everyone drenched in sweat.

  “Think they heard us coming?” Wolfe asked under his breath. “Sound carries a long way on
the water—”

  “And there’s nothing unusual about hearing an airboat out here,” Delko said back in a low voice. “As long as they don’t hear one up close, they shouldn’t think anything of it.”

  The Sea of Grass slid by, saw grass rippling in the wind like yellow waves. A flock of storks flew overhead, long white wings almost seeming to beat in slow motion. The Everglades themselves were a slow-motion phenomenon, overflow from Lake Okeechobee making its gradual way to Florida Bay over a vast, level expanse of wetland; the water they were moving through was no more than a foot deep in places. A flood creeping along at the pace of a snail, supporting a thick gumbo of life along its unhurried way. In many ways, Horatio thought, it was the opposite of a hurricane, nurturing life instead of taking it, creating instead of destroying, calm instead of violent.

  Is that why Sinhurma came here? Does he see this as a birthplace of life, not death?

  He wondered about what they’d find at the end of their journey. He couldn’t believe the cult had come all the way out here simply to kill themselves; Sinhurma’s ego was too big to suicide anywhere but in the spotlight. Of course, by coming after him they were providing that spotlight….

  But that’s what we do. We shine a bright light on the dark places, no matter what we might find. We can’t back off because something might lunge out of that darkness; we can’t let sleeping demons lie.

  The saw grass gave way to mangrove islands, tangled masses of tree trunks crested with birds and bromeliads. An alligator drifted past, eyeing them coldly before submerging without a sound.

  The Garden of Eden. And who does Sinhurma see as the serpent? Me? Have I been written into whatever twisted scripture he’s writing for himself?

  He didn’t know. He also didn’t know how Sinhurma could have convinced Jason to join them after Ruth Carrell was killed—she was obviously murdered to keep her quiet.

  But maybe not so obvious to someone being drugged. And someone grieving over the loss of a loved one fits the profile Murayaki gave me of potential cult recruits.