When they got the ability to be married, the Reverend knew that he had to put an end to all of it. He alone knew that there was only one way to handle this type of invasion. And that’s what it was – an invasion. He explained that every society that began to tolerate the perverts fell. He knew that America was going to fall as well, unless something was done about the problem.
Of course, the Reverend had his share of young boys who he “trained.” It was an open secret, really, but nobody really cared. He explained that his own proclivities were something that were pure and just. He had only the boys’ best interests at heart. That meant that he wasn’t a pervert or disgusting or any of that. He wasn’t like those queers who flaunt their degenerate lifestyle for the whole world to see. What the Reverend did with these young boys was something that was private and secretive. He couldn’t possibly corrupt the rest of the world if the rest of the world didn’t know about what he was doing.
If this was sick logic, Louisa didn’t see it as such. She could only see that the Reverend had the answers for her life. She didn’t question him. She only took orders from him. He knew what he was doing. He knew what was best.
Louisa drummed her fingers on her desk and contemplated what it was that the Reverend had asked her to do. Deep down, she didn’t like it. Deep down, she knew that a Church should never ask her to do what the Reverend was asking of her. A Church was supposed to be about sustaining life, spreading love and guiding people to walk in the service of the Lord.
That’s what a Church was supposed to be.
This Church wasn’t about that.
Louisa just accepted it and didn’t question any of it.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I got home and I was immediately greeted by Rina and Abby.
“Aunt Harper,” Rina shrieked the second I walked through the door. “Oh my god, I can’t tell you how happy we are to be out of that hellhole.”
Abby nudged Rina. “Rina, it wasn’t a hellhole. It was a beautiful hotel suite. We couldn’t have asked for a better place to be hidden.”
Rina shook her head. “It might have been a gorgeous suite, but, come on. We were cooped up in there for like a hundred years.” She rolled her eyes. “I thought I would never get out of there.”
I smiled. “I’m happy to see you girls, too.”
Happy actually wasn’t the word. Ecstatic. The girls made me feel that my life had an actual purpose. I felt that way, occasionally, whenever I got a person off when that person actually was innocent. As I firmly believed Heather to be. But usually, I felt that I was complicit in a system that rewarded winning above all else. Above morality. Morality, unfortunately, didn’t usually enter into the equation on what I was doing.
But these girls made me feel that, perhaps, I did have a purpose on this earth. They were brought to me under the worst of circumstances. The very worst. Yet they could maybe help me with my constant search for redemption for my myriad of sins.
Rina started to dance around the room. “Aunt Harper, tell me,” she said. “Tell me why we’re in your home now. Why now? Why did we suddenly get sprung from that prison?”
I took a deep breath, not knowing if I wanted to tell the girls the truth about all of that. “Well, uh…”
Abby chimed in. “Rina, don’t you remember? I gave you that newspaper article.” She turned to me. “I gave her the article about what happened. I guess she didn’t read it, though.”
“So you know.”
“I do.” Abby hung her head. “It’s horrible.”
“It is.” That was all I could say.
Abby started to cry. “Marina was a nice person. She really was. But she was with this monster. She didn’t deserve…”
Rina came over. “I didn’t forget about that article. But I want us to not look back. That was an awful part of our lives. No use dwelling on it.”
“Dwelling on it?” Abby was incredulous. “It just happened.”
“I know.” Rina shook her head. “I realize that, Abby.” She looked at me with a panicked expression. “Aunt Harper, how can I make her stop crying? She’s been crying ever since she found out. She’s been crying ever since that damned asshole Peter did that to her.”
I didn’t know if I should have corrected her cussing. I personally wasn’t opposed to anybody cussing. I figured that they were just words, and, as a lawyer, I dealt with words all day long. Words can never hurt anyone. Actions hurt. Words didn’t. At least, they didn’t hurt me.
But, at the same time, I was the adult, and she was the child. A young child. If a teacher heard her say those things, she probably would be thrown out of school. “I know how you feel, but I would ask you not to cuss in this house.”
“I understand,” she said. “I just get so damned mad. Damned is okay, isn’t it? I hear my teachers say that word all the time.”
“I guess.” I sighed. Having two young girls under my roof, for good, was going to be an adjustment. They stayed with me before, but that was a little bit different. Now, I was going to be their mother, and I had to try to navigate it all the best that I could. “I just don’t want you to be sent out of class for saying bad words.”
Abby shrugged. “Aunt Harper, you don’t know my school. It’s a private school, but everyone my age is saying bad words, and a lot of kids are already drinking and smoking. I think that smoking is disgusting, but…”
“And drinking is too.” I drew a breath. God knew, this child didn’t need to be getting into the alcohol. Not at at the age of 11. It was bad enough that I started at the age of 14.
Then I had to remind myself that not everyone who drank, even at a young age, would end up with a problem. I did because I was self-medicating, plus I seemed to have had a bad gene somewhere along the line. The girls weren’t going to drink, not until they were of age. I was going to have to make sure of that.
“I guess. I’ve tried wine. My mom…” Rina trailed off. “Who cares what mom did? She met that…man…” She seemed to be choosing her words carefully. “That man, and he beat her, yet she stayed with him. He killed her.”
Just then, she looked over at Abby, who was cowering on the couch, a wad of Kleenex in her tiny hand. “Abby,” she said softly. “Is that it? What happened to Marina is what happened to mom. Is that why you’re crying?”
I was amazed at how sensitive Rina could be to her sister’s moods. I had also figured that Abby was crying not just for Marina, but for their mother, who died much the same way that Marina did. “Yes,” she said, and then started to wail. “Neither of them deserved what, what, what…” She couldn’t finish her sentence. Her sobbing reached a crescendo, and then tapered off, and then crescendoed again.
I sat down next to both of them on the couch. There wasn’t any way that I could take away their pain. It would lessen with time, but I knew that it would never entirely go away. These were two very young girls who were going to be growing up without their mother.
The only thing that I could possibly do was to hopefully make things better for them.
They could never be whole. But they could possibly be better.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Agent Springer shook his head as he examined the body that had washed up on shore. It was the fifth one this week. The media hadn’t yet been alerted that there seemed to be a serial killer who was haunting the city. He was used to seeing this type of thing in the inner cities. Drug deals gone wrong were often the cause behind most of the murders in the city. But this was something different.
He had done the investigative work on the other victims, and none of them seemed to fit the profile of drug dealers or people who would have been involved in the drug trade. None of them even seemed to fit the profile of prostitutes, which was another group that Agent Springer had seen way too much of in his 20 years on the Kansas City police force. They all came from “good” solid Midwest families. Christian families. Families where the parents attended church every Sunday. He had asked around the neighborhood about these families, an
d everyone said the same thing – that they were solid God-fearing salt-of-the-earth people.
The neighborhoods where these kids, the victims, grew up were not the same type of neighborhoods that he was used to seeing murder victims come from. The neighborhoods that “produced” murder victims at a rate that was like a factory were the poor ones. They were the ‘hoods where the houses were run-down, where the weeds grew tall and the homeless slept nearby underneath highway overpasses. Where the cars were as loud as shotguns, both because they were in disrepair and sometimes they were souped up that way.
But these kids came from neighborhoods that weren’t like the troubled ones that he was used to investigating. These were kids who grew up in the Brookside area. The Loose Park area. The Country Club Plaza area. The houses where these kids grew up were all $300,000 and up, which was high for Kansas City. Some of the kids were in private schools. In fact, most of them were, as the Kansas City school district was known for having a multitude of problems.
Kansas City was also known for having a murder problem. Last year, there were 210 murders, which worked out to one every day and a half or so. People were shot in cars, they were killed in parking lots, murdered on the streets. Most of them, however, were known criminals themselves.
If it was all an isolated incident, Agent Springer might have let it go. One suburban kid found murdered was probably a runaway incident. Agent Springer wasn’t naïve enough to think that the suburban families didn’t have their own problems, and their kids ran away just like any other kid might do if their parents were having issues. Once the kids ran away and lived on the streets, they were basically sitting prey for the dregs of the city to pick off.
Two suburban kids in a short span of time might just be a coincidence. He didn’t like to believe in coincidences, but, at the same time, it could very well happen. The kids got tired of the parents being so strict with them, as Christian parents often were, and they rebelled and left the home.
But five kids? In the span of one month? All of them from upper-middle-class neighborhoods? Agent Springer shook his head. No. This wasn’t a coincidence. Somebody was killing these kids. It might be one person, a serial killer. In fact, that was what he believed it was.
There was one other thing that these kids had in common. They were all apparently members of the LGBT community. He had found that out when he did the investigation on the other four kids who were found before this fifth one was. That would apparently make them all targets too. He knew that. Society had not yet fully accepted that some kids were just who they were – they loved members of the same sex, and some of them believed themselves to be members of the opposite sex. It was what it was. Agent Springer’s sister Lucy was a lesbian, and, at first, he had a hard time accepting that Lucy had a wife. But he soon got to know Lucy’s wife, whose name was Susan, and, before he knew it, he was having them over for dinner. His ex-wife, Neila, had no qualms in accepting both of them. In fact, she was excited, because she wanted to add a gay couple into her circle of friends.
But society at large was still grappling with kids being different. He had seen his share of kids who were bullied, harassed, stalked and beaten because of who they were. He had even seen a murder or two of a gay man or a lesbian woman who were apparently killed just because they were different.
He had never seen something like this, though. Not so many in such a short period of time.
There was a connection between the murders. He knew this. The connection went beyond the fact that all the murdered kids were gay, or that all the murdered kids were from well-to-do communities, or that all the kids came from Christian families. There was some other connection, and he was determined that he was going to find it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“Okay, Pearl,” I said to my secretary. “What do you have for me?” It was the day after I got the girls back in my home, and I came in early so that I could pick Pearl’s brain about the reports that she had been studying about Heather’s case.
“I got in touch with the investigator,” she said, as I admired anew her fashion sense. She was wearing skinny black pants and a high-necked sweater with pearls and boots. Her hair was newly braided, and her café au lait skin was unadorned, without makeup. She still looked beautiful. “And we have the initial report on Heather and the mother.” She shook her head. “Girl, all that I can say is that mother over there was cray. Had a serious problem with the cray.”
I nodded my head, feeling more confident that maybe Heather’s story was going to check out after all. I still had the nagging thought that there wasn’t a butcher knife recovered at the scene, and that was certainly going to have to be explained away. But if Pearl read the report and found that the mother was crazy, then this was going to go a long way towards proving to the jury that the mother did, indeed, strike first.
I went into my office and opened up the file. “Pearl,” I said. “Come in here. I need to bounce some ideas off of you. You read the report, so maybe you and I can brainstorm this.” This was something that Pearl and I often did. Because Pearl wasn’t a lawyer, she was the perfect person to poke holes into any theory I could come up with. I found out early on that other lawyers would be blind to certain things. We knew the law, so we assumed that our brains thought the same as a lay-persons.
I found out differently on one of my earliest cases. It was a personal injury case that fell into my lap, because a lawyer friend witnessed the accident, so couldn’t take it himself, as it was a conflict of interest. He couldn’t be both a witness and the lawyer, so he gave it to me.
The accident involved a fire truck and a car. The car had the green light, and the fire truck was barreling through the intersection and hit the car. At first, I thought that this was a loser of a case. Then I started to get into it, and I realized that the fire truck didn’t have its sirens blazing at the time that it came through the intersection, but it did have its lights flashing. I thought that I might have a shot.
The jury came back in five minutes, finding for the defendant, against my client. I came home, feeling dejected, and I ran it by my sister Albany.
“Oh my god,” she said. “I can’t believe that you took that dog of a case.”
“Why was it a dog?”
“Because the fire truck had its lights going. Anybody knows that when that happens, you stop immediately. And your girl proceeded through the intersection, even though she saw that rig barreling towards her. What were you thinking, Harper, taking that?”
What was I thinking, indeed? It was then that I knew that I needed to get a lay person’s perspective of any case, because the jury was going to think just like them. The jury wouldn’t think like lawyers. They would think like people on the street, which is what they basically were.
Pearl sat down across from me. She had a little ball in her hand, which she enjoyed tossing up in the air when she and I did our brainstorming sessions. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”
“The mother was-“ This was our word-association game that warmed us up. I would give her a phrase and she had to complete it without thinking about it. She just had to shout the first thing that came to her mind.
“A Jesus freak.”
“Heather is-“
“A lesbian.” Then she shook her head. “No, sorry, a trans woman.”
“Why did you say lesbian? Why did that come to your head first?”
She blinked her eyes. “I think that I was thinking of something else. The mother. She was a Jesus freak, but she was also a lesbian.”
I perked up when she said that. “Why do you say that?”
“The investigator dug up some information on Connie from one of her friends. He found out that Connie was always hanging out with some gal named Louisa. He got the impression that the relationship between the two was kinda an open secret.”
I bit my lower lip. This was where I had to either trust my gut instinct or try to analyze the situation intellectually. Was Heather’s mother hanging out with Louisa Ga
rrison because they were friends, and Louisa was brainwashing her, or were they actually lovers? It could very well be just that Louisa was busy brainwashing Connie, because I had the feeling that Louisa’s job was to do just that – brainwash the followers into doing whatever the Reverend wanted.
“So?” I asked Pearl. “Isn’t it possible that they were just friends?” I didn’t want to say more about who Louisa was. I wanted Pearl to have as little information as possible. She probably already knew, but I wasn’t going to direct her any more than I had to.
“Come on. She spent the night with her. Heather didn’t tell you that there were nights when her mother didn’t come home?”
“No, she didn’t. I wonder why…”
Now I was going off on this tangent. Connie was a lesbian? Louisa too? Not that any of this surprised me. The most anti-gay people in the world were often the ones who were gay themselves. Struggling with being gay. It was self-loathing at its finest, really. Just like there was always talk that Adolf Hitler was part Jewish, the people who wanted the gays to be wiped off the face of the earth really hated themselves.
I looked out the window at the Country Club Plaza, looking forward to the times when the beautiful buildings would be lit up brilliantly in every color of the rainbow. It was summertime, so that wouldn’t be happening for quite awhile, but the Christmas season was my favorite time of the year. “This could be something that I could use on the stand. I tell you, when I met that woman, I knew that she was hiding something. I had never seen somebody so tightly controlled. It was almost like she knew that if she somehow let down her guard for even a second, it would all come crashing down.” I nodded my head. “A house of cards.”
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