The Scientology Murders

by William Heffernan

  “That boat we were trying to get Mary Kate O’Connell on, the one that investment clown owns; that’s where I want to go.”

  “Edward Tyrell’s boat . . .”

  “That’s it. I couldn’t remember his name. I can get out of here myself. It’ll be safer than having you meet me. As soon as I hear that Tyrell is at his boat I’ll slip out of here, grab a cab, and meet him there. You can tell him whatever you want, but just make it clear that I’ll be staying on the boat until you move me to a new location.”

  He could hear the relief in Oppenheimer’s voice as he agreed to the plan. It would keep his hands clean if everything went south. If the cops nabbed him as he fled the house, Oppenheimer could deny any involvement. His ass would be safe, the fucking coward. And it wasn’t just Oppenheimer. He knew Walsh was in the background pulling the strings for his puppets—Oppenheimer, Tyrell, and who knew how many others. He hoped that someday he would have a chance to pay all of them back.

  Oppenheimer called him again at eleven that evening. Rolf had been watching the street and he was certain the cops were gone. A lone patrol car went by the house every hour, but that seemed to be the only surveillance. Still, he wouldn’t take any chances. He’d jump the fence of the neighboring house and cut through their yard to the street—he’d taken that route before and it had worked well—then head straight to the restaurant at the corner of Main Street where he’d order a beer and call for a cab. Fifteen minutes after the cab arrived he’d be aboard Tyrell’s fifty-three-foot Hatteras yacht. Rolf smiled to himself. It was going to be nice staying in a hideout that could move at high speed if necessary.

  * * *

  Harry returned to his boat and immediately got on his computer. Meg stuck her head into the salon and requested permission to visit. Harry waved her in.

  “What are you up to?” she asked.

  “We think we may have flushed the albino out and that he’ll try to get out of Safety Harbor tonight, so I’m checking with all cab companies that service the area for any fares carrying single males.”

  “What if he goes with a friend from the church?”

  “Then we’re screwed,” Harry said. “But I don’t think anybody inside the church is going to stick their neck out that far.”

  “Sounds like a long night. I’ll get us a good bottle of wine from my private stock.”

  * * *

  Tyrell was waiting for Rolf on the dock.

  “You’ll be going aboard a friend’s yacht in another marina,” Tyrell explained. “The owner, who is also a client, is out of town on an extended business trip and he asked me to keep an eye on the boat for him. He should be gone for the next three or four weeks and you should be out of the area by the time he gets back.”

  “Whose idea was this?” Rolf demanded. He could see that Tyrell was extremely nervous and Rolf was enjoying it.

  “It was Mr. Walsh. He feels the police may be able to trace your movements. If they do and it leads to this marina, my boat will be an obvious place to look for you.”

  “I want to talk to him,” Rolf said.

  “And he wants to talk to you. He asked me to tell you that he’ll call you later tonight.”

  Rolf was pleasantly surprised when he saw the new boat. It was a few years older than Tyrell’s but just as large and comfortable. The Hatteras Yachtfish was a serious sportfishing boat, fitted with outriggers and all the gear needed to pursue and catch major game fish, from blue marlin on down to dorado and wahoo. But it also offered luxurious accommodations with three staterooms, each with a private head and shower, a comfortable salon and dining area, and a well-equipped galley. It was docked in a small marina a quarter-mile across the channel from the marina where the so-called dead detective kept his boat—so near and yet so far.

  Rolf smiled to himself and looked at Tyrell. He was tall and slender, with a gym-fit body that reeked of money right down to his perfectly capped teeth. And he was ready to wet his pants. The man couldn’t wait to get away from him. “This will do very nicely,” Rolf said, making a circular motion with a finger to take in the entire vessel. He held out a hand. “Keys.”

  “Well, you’ll only need keys for the salon door; you won’t be taking her out,” Tyrell said. There was a tremor of fear in his voice.

  “I want a full set of keys.” He gave the guy a hard, unblinking stare.

  Tyrell swallowed hard. “Yes, yes,” he said. “On second thought, that makes better sense.”

  * * *

  Kenneth Oppenheimer entered Walsh’s dimly lit office. He had been tersely summoned, which was always a bad sign, so he had dropped what he was doing and had gone directly to the office’s rear door.

  “When you saw Tony Rolf, how would you describe his mood?” Walsh asked.

  “Volatile.”

  “Volatile in what way?”

  “In every way; I was uncomfortable being in the same room with him. I had no idea what would set him off and I didn’t know if he was armed, but I assumed he was. After all, he’s killed two women, and he’s tried to kill that retired cop twice now.”

  Walsh leaned back in his plush executive desk chair. “Tony has served us well over the years. Don’t you feel we owe him some loyalty . . . If it was your decision, what would you do?”

  “I’d get rid of him, one way or the other.”

  “Kill him?”

  “No, of course not,” Oppenheimer said. “I’m not a killer and I don’t condone it from others.”

  “There’s an interesting word in the church’s lexicon. It’s called unmock. It means to have a person or thing disappear, become nothing, cease to exist.”

  “Cease to exist as in death?”

  “Mr. Hubbard never elaborated on the word. I think it’s fair to say it was left open to interpretation.”

  * * *

  Tony Rolf sat in one of the salon’s plush chairs and drummed his fingers on a side table. Walsh should have called him by now. He glanced at his watch; it was nearly eleven. They all thought they could put him off, make him wait. But when they wanted him to do something, it had to be done lickity-split. That stupid expression, it had been one of his father’s favorites. But so was: You little freak. That was reserved for when he addressed his only son, the albino, the child whose very existence disgraced him.

  His father was convinced his mother had cheated on him with some degenerate who had passed on the inferior gene. None of the doctors the boy went to could convince him he was wrong, and whenever he went on a bender—which was often—he would come home and beat his mother and then him, just on general principle.

  He still remembered the day his father had stopped hitting him. He was fourteen and his father was fat and flabby and fifty. That afternoon Tony had gotten a roll of nickels at a bank and wrapped it with tape. A street thug he had befriended had showed him how. Then he held the roll of taped nickels in his right hand and closed his fist around it. His street friend had called them “a poor man’s brass knuckles” and said it would allow him to hit with the power of a professional fighter.

  This time, when his father had finished with his mother and turned on him, he was ready. He hit him flush on the jaw with every ounce of strength he had, and the fat bastard had gone down like a bag of wet laundry.

  He was on him as soon as he hit the ground and one blow was followed by another and another, as years of hatred and frustration poured out of him. After half a dozen blows his mother wrapped her arms around him and struggled to pull him off.

  “Stop, Tony, you’ll kill him, you’ll kill him!”

  He had turned and glared at her. “I want to kill him,” he hissed. “I want it more than anything else in the world.”

  When he went to bed that night he locked his door from the inside and waited up most of the night. But his father had left the house and stayed away for several days. Finally, when he returned, he acted as though nothing had happened, but Tony knew the miserable bastard was only biding his time, waiting to catch him unawares. That was
when he had bought his first knife, a six-inch switchblade finely honed and razor sharp. His street friend had instructed him on its use: stick it hard in the belly and then pull the cutting edge up. He had explained that every vital organ in the human body was only three inches below the skin and a six-inch blade like his was more than enough to cut most of them in half. Now it was just a matter of deciding when and where.

  That time came three days later, when his father jimmied open his bedroom door at three a.m. and found Tony sitting in bed waiting for him. The switchblade flashed open and his father stared at it, then turned and ran. Tony never saw him again. Three months later they learned he had been killed in a barroom fight.

  His cell phone rang at eleven thirty, driving away his reminiscences.

  “I’m sorry to be calling you so late. I hope I didn’t wake you.” Walsh’s voice sounded so calm, as if no danger surrounded them, no threat existed. It was the same as it had been twelve years earlier when Walsh had plucked him off a Los Angeles street only minutes before the police arrived to arrest him. Walsh had opened the doors of the church to him and employed him to help enforce its rules. At Walsh’s suggestion he had changed his name to further thwart the police and they had moved him to Florida.

  “No, I was awake.”

  “I understand from Ken Oppenheimer that you’re not happy with the support you’re getting. Is that true, Tony?”

  “It’s true,” he said, trying to keep his voice neutral.

  “What specifically did you find unsupportive?”

  “Everything,” Tony snapped. “Everything that matters. I was stashed away in that house in Safety Harbor without regular contact with anyone. Just told to sit and wait.” He instantly regretted lashing out at Walsh. This was the one person in the church who had always been supportive of him. In fact, he had always viewed himself as essentially Walsh’s creation.

  “It was my fault,” Walsh said. “I was being overly cautious. I gave the police too much credit. But I won’t make that mistake again.”

  Tony thought of how close the police had come. “And maybe I was taking too many chances.”

  Walsh chuckled on the other end of the phone. “You are a bit cavalier at times. A touch of restraint would be a good habit to cultivate. But I’ve always felt your occasional lapses were due to an eagerness to do good for the church, and that’s a quality I admire.” He paused to let his words sink in. “Tony, are you familiar with the word unmock?”

  “Yes, it means to make someone or something disappear, or stop existing.”

  “Precisely, either figuratively or literally, and that’s your job within the church. But only on a direct order from me.”

  “I understand.”

  “Good. And for the time being we’re going to forget about this retired police officer. His son is the greater danger.”

  “Do you want him . . . ?”

  “No, not yet, I’d prefer that he be disgraced in some way. But that’s going to require some thought. So, for the time being, you just sit tight and stay out of sight.” Walsh chuckled again, at the rhyming words. “How poetic I am,” he said.

  Rolf joined in with a faint laugh.

  “I promise you, it won’t be long before we can get you out of here.”

  “That’s good to hear,” Rolf said, hanging up the phone.

  “You’re the only one who can handle that psychopath,” said Oppenheimer, who’d been listening to the conversation on a muted handset.

  “I hope you’re right. And I hope he stays handled. Otherwise we may be forced to unmock Mr. Rolf,” Walsh responded

  Chapter Twelve

  Meg Adams saw the older woman surreptitiously making her way down the dock. She recognized her immediately as Harry’s birth mother; a woman who had killed her two children, except one of them had lived. She looked at her watch. It was seven a.m., too early for the dock Nazi to be in his office. She debated whether to call Harry or the police. Harry had gotten in so late the night before and had just wanted to sleep. He had turned down a glass of good wine and her. This wasn’t something that had happened very often in her life. It made her like him even more.

  Meg stepped off her boat and approached Harry’s mother. “Can I help you?”

  Lucy Santos stopped dead in her tracks, almost as though Meg’s words were a barrier suddenly placed in her path. “I know you?” she asked as her eyes flitted from side to side.

  “I’m a friend of Harry’s and I know who you are. You’re his mother and you are not supposed to be here. You’ll be arrested if you don’t leave.”

  Lucy stared at her for almost half a minute. Her face twisted into a hateful rage. “Puta,” she said. “Get out of my way.”

  Lucy’s hand slipped into her purse and Meg got scared. Then she heard feet hitting the dock behind her and suddenly Harry was moving past her.

  Harry grabbed his mother’s wrist and pulled her hand from her purse, then twisted the wrist until the eight-inch carving knife she held fell onto the dock. He spun her around and within seconds had her hands cuffed behind her back.

  “Harry, Harry, why you do this to me?” Lucy pleaded.

  “You’re under arrest. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you. Do you understand what I have told you?”

  “Oh, Harry, why you do this to me?”

  Harry glanced back at Meg. “Call the police—911—and tell them an officer needs assistance. Tell them who I am and that I just made an arrest of an armed woman and give them this location. I don’t want to let go of her until they get here.”

  * * *

  Harry watched as two uniformed officers led Lucy Santos to a waiting patrol car. With the police officers and his mother headed away, he turned his attention to Meg. “What you did was foolish and dangerous. She could have hurt you . . . badly. And I assure you, she’s very, very capable of doing just that.”

  Meg studied her shoes. “I didn’t know what else to do. I saw her coming down the dock, headed for your boat. The marina office wasn’t open yet, and I didn’t want to call the police. I didn’t want you waking up and learning that I’d had your mother arrested.”

  “She’s not my mother. She gave up that right when she murdered my brother and me.” Harry watched Meg’s cheeks redden. “I don’t mean to lecture you. I’m just worried about her hurting you. No matter what the shrinks at the prison hospital say, she’s dangerous. She’s not carrying that carving knife to open her fan mail. She’s still as crazy as a shithouse rat.”

  Meg looked up at him like a little girl. “I just don’t want you to be mad at me.”

  Harry shook his head and slowly allowed a smile to come to his lips. “I guess you haven’t had many male friends whose mothers carried carving knives in their purses.”

  “Only one or two,” Meg replied in kind.

  “Come on, I’ll buy you breakfast.”

  * * *

  After breakfast Harry took Meg back to her boat, then went to the Clearwater police headquarters to sign the paperwork on his mother’s arrest. Because she had a knife in her possession and had to be disarmed by a police officer (albeit, her son), Lucy was sent to the Pinellas County women’s jail to be held until her arraignment in court.

  Harry then caught up with Max Abrams to see if anything had developed in the search for Tony Rolf.

  “A big zero,” Max said from behind his desk. “And until something does, my captain wants me to concentrate on more immediate stuff.” He shook his head in disgust. “I asked him what was more immediate than another attempt on Jocko Doyle’s life and he said not to worry, he was increasing the police protection around Jocko.”

  “I’ve been expecting that, but since he’s agreed to increasing the guard, maybe you could ask him to put M.J. Moore in charge of the detail.”

  “Yeah, good idea,” Max said. “I’ll put in for her.”


  “Okay. And I’ll stay on Rolf and keep you posted on anything I find,” Harry said.

  “Anything comes up on him here, I’ll let you know. In the meantime, I got a court order to enter that house we thought he was in. I’m sending in a forensics team to search the house and dust for prints. If he was there we’ll know by the end of the day.”

  * * *

  Harry reached out to Vicky to fill her in on where the search for Rolf stood. They met for lunch at Pete & Shorty’s Tavern, an old-time Clearwater bar/restaurant on Gulf to Bay Boulevard. On first glance it was a ramshackle place with a long bar complemented by booths and tables that were clearly from another era. There were additional tables on a covered patio as well that substituted fresh air for the feeling of a time gone by, but Harry and Vicky preferred the old Florida ambiance offered indoors. There was an ancient pulley system running above the bar that carried food orders out to the kitchen and a staff of loyal waitresses who greeted everyone like a long-lost relative. The walls were covered with framed newspaper articles and old advertisements calling back to a day before air-conditioning, when Clearwater was just an oversized beach community that catered to winter visitors.

  Harry and Vicky declined the offered menus and ordered the restaurant’s signature pork tenderloin sandwiches, the pork pounded to a thin sliver and then breaded and fried, each piece big enough to overflow the roll on which it was served. Then they settled in to comfortable cop talk.

  “The captain is being his usual prick self about me taking time off,” Vicky said, “but there isn’t much he can do about it. It’s all legitimate vacation time or comp time.”

  “And he still doesn’t know we’re after the clown who shot Jocko?”

  “He hasn’t a clue,” Vicky said. “Abrams has done a great job of shielding us from both his own bosses and ours. We’ve got no business working a Clearwater case in any official capacity. You’re working it on your own time as a private citizen, and that’s not a problem as long as the Clearwater cops don’t object. So far, nobody who could object has caught on to what we’re doing. And you know our captain would object. He’d figure this case would be one of the biggest during his time on the job and he wouldn’t want to be left out. If he wasn’t such a know-nothing political hack, I’d invite him to join us, just to play it safe, but it would just be extra work teaching him what to do.”