The Scientology Murders

by William Heffernan

  Igor raised an eyebrow as Harry began putting on latex gloves. “I just want to check something for my report,” Harry explained.

  “It’s very straightforward,” Igor said. “Also quick and I believe quite painless.”

  Harry nodded and reached down and cupped her head in his hands. Her neck had stiffened with rigor mortis and would remain so for several more hours. All the color had drained from her face, and contrasted with her bright red hair, it made her look pasty and unnatural.

  Where in Alaska, Meg? he asked silently. What’s his final destination?

  The flash came to his mind again but it was very weak and hard to understand.

  “What are you doing?” Igor asked.

  Harry looked up at him and gave a slight shake of his head. “Just saying goodbye.”

  “You knew the victim?”

  “Yes,” Harry said. “Not well, but I knew her and I liked what I knew.”

  When he left the bedroom, Vicky was waiting for him. “Anything?” she asked.

  “It was very weak,” Harry said. “The only thing that came through clearly was the name Glacier Bay. I’m going there. Can you come with me? I’ll cover all our expenses.”

  “You bet I can.”

  “Thank you, Vicky. We better pick up some warmer clothes. It gets cold up there at night.”

  * * *

  Tony boarded his plane at nine a.m. carrying a cup of Starbucks coffee.

  “Welcome aboard, sir,” a plump, middle-aged flight attendant said with a smile.

  Rose, his previous flight attendant, had been right. There were no first class accommodations, not even a shapely young thing to welcome him aboard. He didn’t bother to take note of this one’s name.

  When the plane landed an hour later, Tony found himself in one of the smallest airports he had ever seen. The plane taxied to a terminal that was little more than a large room with two check-in counters. Bags on incoming flights were simply unloaded onto the tarmac to allow the passengers to pick them up. There was an effort at security—one TA agent waving a wand over passengers who were waiting to board the flight Tony had just left.

  Tony looked around for someone holding a sign with the name Rawlings on it. Instead, a short, portly man with a two-day growth of beard approached him and extended his hand.

  “Tony,” he said, “I’m Malcolm Vandermere. Friends call me Dutch. I went to school with Regis Walsh and I’m your protector here in big, bad Alaska.” He released Tony’s hand from a bearlike grip.

  Tony looked around at the dozen or so passengers who had been on the flight with him. “How’d you know who I was?” he asked.

  “Easy, you were the only person on board I didn’t recognize.” He let out a rolling laugh. “That’s the joy of living in a town of four hundred people.”

  Dutch grabbed Tony’s bag and led him to a spanking-new Range Rover Sport. Within a minute they were speeding down a dirt road. Suddenly, Dutch hit the brakes as a female moose ambled across the road. He hit the horn and she jumped and picked up her gait.

  “Damn fool moose,” Dutch said. “They’re okay during the daylight hours—and right now we’ve got a lot of those, with the sun rising around four a.m. and setting at about eleven p.m. But in the dark they’re deadly.”

  “Why is that?” Tony asked.

  “’Cause their eyes don’t glow at night like most animals. And their coat is so damn dark; they’re just suddenly there in front of you, all 700 to 1,200 pounds of them. And you see how tall they are. Well, you hit those legs and that enormous body just comes right in through your windshield. Then it’s good night, Irene, believe you me.” Dutch’s cherubic face seemed to glow as he spoke.

  “What about grizzly bears?”

  “We don’t have grizzlies. Some call ’em that, but we’ve got a different variety. What we’ve got is the brown bear. They’re bigger and meaner. A brown bear only knows two kinds of animal: there’s other bears like him, and there’s food. And if you’re not one, you’re definitely the other.”

  “I’d like to see one,” Tony said.

  “Easy enough. I was going to fly you over the area tomorrow, give you sort of the grand tour of Glacier Bay. You’ll see everything from bear to mountain goats to breaching whales.”

  Tony’s face was like that of a little boy who had just been told he was going to Disney World for the first time. “Hey, how cool is that?” he said.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Harry telephoned the Alaska State Police headquarters in Anchorage and explained his situation. He was told there were no police officers of any kind in Gustavus and that officers were only sent there when a crime had been committed. In cases of fugitives, they required reasonable proof that the criminal in question was actually there.

  “We’ve got the Fourth of July coming up the day after tomorrow,” the state cop told him. “It’s a big day for parades and for arrests. We won’t have anybody in any of the bush towns until the fifth. And those will be cops sent to investigate specific crimes. If you’re coming up here, check in again when you land and we’ll do all we can to help you find your guy, okay?”

  Harry thanked him and explained the situation to Vicky.

  “Wow, I’ve heard about the boonies. I’ve even seen a few boonies. But these are the real boonies. No cops unless a crime is committed. Is it like the Canadian Mounties? You have one murderer, they send one Mountie?”

  “We’re about to find out,” Harry said. He handed her a folder of airline tickets. “Did you pack a jacket and boots, gloves, all that warm stuff?”

  “I did.”

  “It’s going to be a long ride with a layover in Seattle. When Regis Walsh hides somebody, he really hides them.”

  * * *

  The next morning Dutch and Tony boarded Dutch’s twin-engine Cessna and taxied onto the runway. “We’ll go up and circle until I spot a whale, and move around it so you can see it breach.”

  “What kind of whales will we see?” Tony asked.

  “Big whales. You could see almost anything—grays, blues, anything—but this time of year it’s mostly humpbacks. When they breach they rise up out of the water and then crash back down, it’s pretty spectacular, and their song is the most beautiful of them all. It’s haunting is what it is, and once you hear it you never forget.”

  Once they were in the air, Dutch circled, then pointed through the windscreen. “There’s one now.”

  Tony followed his hand and below he saw a massive dark shape in the water. Then the animal dove, flipping its fluted tail as it disappeared into deeper water.

  “Where . . .” Tony began, but Dutch cut him off.

  “Wait.”

  Within a few seconds the giant mammal rose up out of the water, its massive fins extended; then it seemed to roll in the air onto its side and float back down to the surface where its weight sent a plume of water thirty feet into the air.

  “Jesus,” Tony said.

  “They’re big. Females get to be fifty feet long, about the same size as a gray whale. They weigh up to forty tons. But they’re nothing compared to a blue whale. Those babies grow up to a hundred feet and are twice as heavy. They’re the largest animal to ever live on this earth. They’re bigger than the biggest dinosaur.”

  Dutch leveled the aircraft and headed farther up the bay. Ahead Tony could see nothing but snowcapped mountains and wilderness beyond the shoreline. They hugged the shore and Dutch pointed to moose walking along the water’s edge. Farther up the steeper slopes, mountain goats moved in small herds; closer to the water, a massive brown bear waddled along looking for an easy meal.

  “Jesus, those bears are big too,” Tony said.

  “If you were down there on the ground and he reared up on his hind legs, he’d be ten to twelve feet tall,” Dutch explained. “And he could run thirty miles an hour in short spurts. What I’m gettin’ at: if he wanted to have you for lunch, he’d have you for lunch, unless you had a mighty big gun and were a damn fine shot. But there’s
another problem too. Because of all the hunting up here, the brown bears have learned that the sound of a rifle shot is like a dinner bell. They follow that sound, they know they’re likely to find a deer or moose carcass just waiting to be eaten.”

  Dutch brought the plane down to about one hundred feet. Ahead of them lay the Muir Glacier, a massive ice floe that cut through the mountains until it reached the water’s edge. It stood some forty feet above the water, and as they approached a massive piece broke away and slid into the bay.

  “Welcome to America’s last wilderness,” Dutch said. “It’s like it talks to you. It says, I’m big enough if you are. Now, let’s head back and get ourselves cleaned up. We can have us a big steak and arrange for a flight to Homer in the morning.” He turned his head and smiled at Tony. “Homer is where I’m gonna hide you out until Regis calls and tells me it’s safe for you to leave.”

  “Why Homer?”

  “Because I’ve got businesses there that nobody messes with,” Dutch said. “I’ve got a halibut fishing fleet and a fish-packing plant, and back in the mountains I’ve got a big game–hunting operation. Nobody gets into either of them unless I say so.”

  “Which am I going to?” Tony asked.

  “To start out with, I’m thinking the hunting camp. If it looks like nobody’s followed you here, maybe we can switch to the fishing fleet or maybe the packing plant, if you don’t like being out on the water.”

  “I don’t know . . .”

  “We’ll give you a look at both of them and let you choose. I want you to be safe, but I don’t want you to be miserable. So we’ll have a look at each and let you decide.”

  “Sounds good,” Tony said.

  * * *

  Harry and Vicky checked into the Seattle Airport Marriott Hotel for their layover to await morning flights to Juneau and Gustavus. After freshening up they took a cab to Cutters Crabhouse Restaurant, which had been recommended by the hotel concierge. The restaurant sat on the waterfront across from Pike Place Market and offered water views from nearly every table.

  After treating themselves to steamed whole Dungeness crab, they settled in for some quiet talk of how they would proceed in Alaska.

  “I don’t know how much help we can expect,” Harry said. “It’s a different kind of policing than I’ve seen.”

  “It’s a different kind of place,” Vicky said. “From the reading I’ve been able to do, it seems that people are spread out in some pretty wild and hard-to-reach places. A crime happens out in the bush, as they call it, and state troopers are sent in to find out what happened, locate the perp, and bring him or her in. And if the perp doesn’t wait around to be collared, they have a chase through the wilderness. Doesn’t sound like much fun.”

  “Not with all the animals out there just waiting to pounce.”

  “I guess some of these backwoods characters are pretty rugged. Probably like some of the swamp rats you hear about who roam the Everglades.”

  “Thank God our boy’s a city kid. I don’t think he’d last very long in the wilderness.”

  “No,” Vicky said. “But neither would we. Let’s hope we get some help.”

  “I’ll call when we reach Juneau. Our best guess is that he’s in Gustavus. But if they ask how I know that, what the hell do I say—a dead woman told me?”

  “I don’t think we’d get a very positive reaction if you told them that.”

  “Yeah, they’d probably lock me up and order some tests by the house shrink.”

  Vicky raised her coffee cup to her lips to hide the grin on her face.

  “Go ahead, say it,” Harry pressed.

  “I wasn’t going to say anything.”

  “If you’re not careful, I’ll feed you to the first bear we come across.”

  “Now what would a big old bear want with a sweet young thing like me?”

  “Dessert.”

  * * *

  Dutch let out a roar of laughter that filled his massive log home on Strawberry Point. The remnants of the steaks his Tlingit Indian housekeeper had prepared lay on their plates, as they sipped the fine pinot noir brought up from his private wine cellar.

  “So you heard that wild-ass story about Prescott Bush, old George H.W.’s daddy, stealing Geronimo’s bones when he was a member of Skull and Bones at Yale?” Dutch said. “Now if it was true, I couldn’t tell you, because you’re not a Bonesman yourself. Only members of the society can know society secrets. And if it was a bald-faced lie I wouldn’t say so, either. It’s just too damn good a story. It shouldn’t be dismissed, it should be perpetuated.”

  “So that’s where you met Regis Walsh,” Tony said, “in Skull and Bones?”

  “No, we just happened to be roommates in our freshman year. We were both legacy students, meaning our parents or grandparents attended Yale. I wouldn’t have gotten in if I wasn’t a legacy. George W. Bush was a legacy too, and like him I was a fuck-up in prep school. Like W., I was also a legacy in Skull and Bones.” Dutch’s round cheeks seemed to swell to even greater size as he warmed to his tale.

  “So anyway, Regis and I were roommates as freshmen, and remained close friends throughout our years at college. Now, I was ‘tapped’ for membership in Skull and Bones at the end of my junior year, which is when you’re picked, and I lobbied for Regis to be tapped as well. Years later, when Regis became involved in Scientology and rose in its ranks, he urged me to join and I did. It’s been very helpful to me. I have many investors in my various enterprises who are members of the church.”

  Tony looked the man over. He was a short, plump, red-faced man who had been handed things all his life. A privileged person, as they said, somebody who’d never had to worry about making the rent, or affording a restaurant meal, or maybe putting off buying new shoes until next month because the money wasn’t there this month. He was exactly the type of person Tony had always resented. And now here he was, dependant on that very same kind of privileged jerk for his survival.

  “It must be nice growing up rich,” Tony said, fighting to keep the sarcasm from his voice.

  Dutch stared at him, as if momentarily stunned by his words. Then he gathered himself. “It is,” he said. “It damn well is. I just never think about it because I’ve always been rich. My daddy handed it to me, just as his daddy handed it to him, and so on for generations of Vandermeres. It all began in Amsterdam in the 1600s when some ancient Dutch relative started a bank. All I’ve ever seen is paintings of the old sob.”

  Tony thought about his own history. It didn’t go beyond his drunken mother and her series of abusive boyfriends. Imagine having a relative who had started a bank centuries ago and whose portrait hung in your family’s home. That was some heavy shit. And it filled him with rage that someone should have so much and he should have so little. Why? Why had he been handed the shitty end of the stick?

  Dutch’s house phone rang and he excused himself to answer it. He was back within a few minutes and announced that they were set to fly out of Gustavus at nine the next morning.

  “It’s a little over five hundred miles to Homer so I like to use a bigger aircraft than my Cessna. A few years back my company picked up an old twin-engine DC-3 that had been completely refurbished inside and out. It can land just about anywhere in Alaska or Canada and it’s a big, sturdy old thing that’ll get us anywhere we want to go. For long hops, like back to the original forty-eight, we have a Gulfstream jet. But that baby requires a runway a helluva lot longer than they’ve got in Homer. We keep her in Juneau.”

  “Have you heard anything about anybody following me?” Tony asked.

  “Nothing, but I’ll check with Regis before we decide where to start you off—the fishing fleet or the hunting camp. Do you have a preference?”

  “I assume the fishing fleet headquarters is still in civilization and the hunting camp is out in the . . . well, out in the woods, right?”

  “You got it,” Dutch said. “Although this is a pretty ritzy hunting camp. That’s why we can charge our guests an
arm and a leg to stay there. You wouldn’t exactly be living in a dirt-floor cabin.”

  “Well, I guess I’d prefer the place that has more civilization to it.”

  “Okay, then we’ll start you out in the fishing office in Homer, and if word comes down the pike that the police are heading that way, we’ll move you out to the hunting camp.” Dutch tapped the side of his nose. “And I assure you, nobody gets out there without my say so.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Tony said.

  * * *

  Harry and Vicky landed in Juneau at nine a.m. just as Dutch’s DC-3 was heading down the runway in Gustavus. It was July 3 and Dutch and Tony would be several hundred miles over the Gulf of Alaska by the time Harry and Vicky landed in Gustavus—a day late and a dollar short, as Jocko would have said.

  The interior of the DC-3 had a four-seat grouping of lounge chairs facing each other in its forward section and two sofas that converted into beds in the aft. Dutch and Tony occupied two of the lounge chairs, each with a drink on a side table. Tony looked out a starboard window at the snow-covered mountain range spread out as far as he could see. July, and there was all that snow, he thought. The lower ranges were clear and green and thick with heavy growth in pines and cedar. This was where the brown bear and moose and deer would roam free. Dutch had told him that there were areas so remote that the animals there had probably never seen a human being. Ahead of them, to the south of Homer, lay Kodiak Island, home to the largest brown bears in all of Alaska. Dutch had told him that the largest on record weighed 2,400 pounds and stood nine feet eight inches tall on its hind legs. It had a nine-inch layer of fat covering its body. And they were only slightly smaller than polar bears.

  “What are you thinking about?” Dutch asked.

  “I was just looking out at the wilderness and remembering what you told me about the animals that live there,” Tony said.

  “Awesome, isn’t it?”