Chasing Deception

by Dave Milbrandt

  The Christmas tree and decorations on the left side of the room suggested a holiday merriment belied by the more than two dozen bodies strewn about the floor, all lifeless and in contorted positions. Pained grimaces were frozen on the still faces. Clawed hands clutched crumpled paper cups; a vivid testimony of last moments spent writhing in sheer agony. The two reporters stood motionless in silent shock, unable to comprehend the horror. Shaking off the momentary stupor, Melissa bolted for the door with Jim at her heels. They gulped deep breaths of clean mountain air that was only slightly tainted by the decay of rotting human flesh. They moved away from the building until the desire to vomit subsided.

  Collecting himself, Jim pulled the cell phone from his messenger bag and began dialing.

  “Emerald Valley Police Department, this is Sherry.”

  “Sherry, it’s Jim Mitchell. I need to talk to P.J. It’s important.”

  “He’s in a meeting, Jim, but I’ll text him for you. This could take a minute, though.”

  Jim covered the phone’s mouthpiece. “P.J.’s in a meeting.”

  “P.J.?” Melissa asked.

  “Percival Jefferson Gibson, but was going by P.J. when I met him in junior high. It’s a long story.”

  “Jim, this had better be important.” Jim was unfazed by P.J.’s terse tone.

  “You know the old campground in Crestline where the New Creation Community is located?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I need you to come up here right away.”

  “No can do, my friend. I’m in a meeting at the department until ten o’clock. Besides, Crestline is way outside of my jurisdiction. I’m a police officer, Jim, not a Texas Ranger.”

  “Percival, I am standing just outside a room filled with two dozen dead bodies. I think the chief might understand if you have to cut things short.”

  P.J. paused for a moment. “I’ve got a couple friends in the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, and I can catch a ride with one of them. I’ll be there as soon as I can. Don’t touch anything!”

  “Yes, sir.” Jim hung up.

  Melissa grabbed Jim’s arm. “Jim, where’s Vince?”

  Shock registered on Jim’s face. “I had forgotten all about him!” Jim turned and ran back inside the recreation room. He searched frantically, making sure not to disturb the bodies. In the far corner, Jim found his cousin sprawled on the floor.

  “Why God, why?” Jim moaned as he knelt beside Vince’s curled body. Scenes of their childhood flitted before his eyes. Then the acrid odor of Vince’s death filled his nostrils. Jumping to his feet, Jim turned and vomited into a 55-gallon rubber trashcan at the front of the room. Melissa helped him up, and walked him outside to a nearby bench. As he stared at the ground in shock, she soaked two tissues with some of the bottled water she had in her purse. She offered the wet tissues to him and handed him two dry tissues when he had finished cleaning himself up. Then she put her arm around his shoulders. “What do you want to do?”

  Jim’s unfocused gaze slid over to her and then he did what he always did when grief and horror came too close to home. He pushed the emotions away, as he had done so many times in his life. He clung to his job, his lifeline to sanity.

  “We’re reporters.” Jim’s voice held no emotion. “We do our jobs.”

  “Jim, you just found your cousin’s dead body in there. You’re too close to this story. You need to back off.”

  He sighed. “I’m really not up for a reminder of why it’s unethical to report on family members, OK?”

  Compassion filled Melissa voice. “Jim, I don’t care about ethics right now. I’m worried about your soul. Your cousin is dead. Nobody is expecting you to be ‘super-reporter’. Back off, for your own sake.”

  Jim turned toward Melissa, looking into her eyes. She clearly saw the pain in his eyes and could tell he was struggling to keep his explosive emotions just below the surface.

  “Melissa, I know Vince is lying in that room dead and there is nothing I can do about it.” He breathed deeply to keep the tears from starting. “I’m a reporter. All I have right now is my job! Don’t ask me to give that up, too.”

  A few minutes later, Sgt. Mandy Dixon and three deputies from the sheriff’s sub station in Twin Peaks arrived to secure the scene until P.J. and several more deputies from the Central Station in downtown San Bernardino could make it up the mountain. Since they knew they would be waiting a while, Jim suggested going into town for some coffee, and Melissa agreed.

  “Sergeant, where can we get a good cup of coffee around here?”

  “I’d try Lake Gregory Coffee Company on Lake Drive. The coffee is good and, if you’re hungry, their brownies are amazing.”

  “Sounds good.” Jim smiled as he turned to Melissa to decide who would go.

  “I’ll go get the coffee and you can stay here to make sure we don’t miss anything important. I think I’ll get something for the deputies as well.”

  “Good idea. That way if we need to ask them for special access to the crime scene, they’ll be more likely to bend the rules for us.”

  Melissa chuckled. “Actually, I was just offering because it’s the nice thing to do since we’ll all just be standing around for an hour or so.”

  Jim smiled as he handed over his car keys. “There’s that, too.”

  Melissa returned about half an hour later with several coffees and treats to go around. She handed Jim a dark roast coffee in a tall cup and they sat down on at the bench outside the main hall. “Have you talked to Dan?”

  Jim nodded. “He said it would be a while before anyone can get up here. He recommended we keep a close watch as the police investigate what happened, but we shouldn’t do something stupid like interfere and get ourselves arrested or anything.”

  “That sounds like Dan, alright.” She paused. “What do you suggest we do until the everybody else gets here?”

  “Wait.”

  The two were quiet for a moment before Melissa decided to fill the downtime with lighter conversation topics. “So, why did you become a reporter?”

  Jim smiled as he recounted the tale. “I was 10 years old and there were some teenagers driving through our neighborhood smashing mailboxes with baseball bats. This got my dad pretty angry and he didn’t get angry very often. He said ‘people around here put in a hard day’s work and they don’t deserve to be harassed when they’re at home trying to enjoy some peace and quiet’. So I investigated what happened, I interviewed the neighbors as to who they thought the suspects were. They had come by the neighborhood two Tuesday nights in a row, so I snuck out of the house that next Tuesday and waited for them to come by. I hid in the bushes with my pencil and small notepad I had borrowed from my dad’s desk until they came barreling down the street.”

  “Did you catch them?”

  “Got the license plate number and everything. When I gave the information to my dad, he just got this big grin on his face. He patted me on the shoulder and said ‘Good job, son. Just don’t tell your mother what you did’. Found out later it was some seniors from Emerald Valley High with too much free time on their hands. It was then I realized I could use journalism to right the wrongs in our world. I was a bit idealistic for a fifth-grader.” Jim smiled. “What about you? How did you get into the business?”

  Melissa paused as her mood downshifted. “My story isn’t really a happy one. When I was a senior in high school my friend, Alicia, was killed in a car accident. She wasn’t my best friend, but we had gone to school together since the third grade. Alicia was a quiet girl who spent more time reading Jane Austen than she did making friends. I was one of the few kids who could get her to put down her book and start talking.

  “She had gotten her license at the end of March and was driving to the bookstore after dinner to get a new copy of Emma. The guy in the other car wasn’t paying attention and ran a red light, plowing his minivan into Alicia’s mom’s Toyota Tercel. She died at the hospital the next morning. The girl’s mom knew I wrote poetry and
was good in English, so she asked me to speak at Alicia’s memorial service. Her mom wanted me to tell people ‘who Alicia really was’. It was a tall order, but I figured I was probably one of the people at school who knew her best.

  “I didn’t know what to write, so my mom went to the library and found a obituary in the Los Angeles Times about Princess Diana. I had never read a feature obit before and I loved how it told the best parts of the person’s life. So I wrote out a ‘tribute’ which sounded something like that story and read it at the memorial. I got so many compliments I realized my calling. It was my job to tell people’s stories while they were still here and could appreciate them.”

  They sat silently for a few moments as they listened to chirping birds and other sounds of nature. Jim finally broke the silence.

  “What’s the best story you’ve ever written?”

  “That’s easy. You see, there was this homeless girl…” Melissa continued with the story, and her spirits improved considerably. Jim also enjoyed sharing his favorite story, which involved calling a White House spokesman to comment on a presidential program that impacted several cities in the Courier’s coverage area. They swapped “war stories” until P.J. arrived about an hour later with a forensics team and a coroner’s deputy.

  Since the sheriff’s department was the lead agency, P.J. stuck with Jim and Melissa as the formal investigation began. The reporters had kept their word and hadn’t touched anything in the room. And P.J. didn’t need to know about the photos of the bodies Jim had taken with Melissa’s camera. He doubted Dan would let them run the pictures, but he would rather have them than be yelled at for not getting them when he had the chance.

  P.J. strode briskly toward the pair. “How did you get in?”

  “The gate was open.”

  “That’s trespassing, Jim.”

  “I don’t think they’ll be pressing charges.”

  As P.J. passed them two pair of latex gloves, Jim told Melissa they were fortunate the deputies were allowing them access to the scene while they worked the room.

  “See, I told you buying them coffee would help us out in the end.” Jim smirked.

  After entering the building, they covered their mouths and noses with one hand once they noticed the stench.

  “How hot is it in here?” Dixon asked.

  A deputy found the thermostat. “83 degrees, ma’am.”

  “That’s why it smells so bad. Turn the thermostat off! Let’s get a window opened and get some of this ‘aroma’ out of here.”

  Once two windows were opened and the heat was turned off, Jim and Melissa stood with P.J. out of the way as the deputies began looking around the room.

  “Sarge, you better come and look at this.”

  Dixon walked over to the deputy, who was crouched down beside the body of a pregnant woman. She talked in hushed tones with the deputy for a minute or two and then asked P.J. for a consultation. After a couple of whispered exchanges, they returned to Jim and Melissa. P.J.’s furrowed brow suggested his stress had just jumped a few notches.

  “What was that all about?”

  P.J. sighed. “That was the body of Councilman Holcombe’s daughter, Angela.”

  Jim thought for a moment before he realized he had overlooked the obvious. “Sergeant, has anyone found the body of Jeremiah Harmon?”

  “No we haven’t.” Dixon grimaced before issuing orders to the deputies.

  “Baeza, call dispatch and get an official homicide team up here. Faiella and Montoya, search the camp and see if you can find Jeremiah Harmon. P.J., do you have a picture of Harmon?”

  P.J. handed her a copy the photo of Harmon that had run in the Courier. “This should help you out.”

  “We’ll need to seal off the area and set up a command post for when this gets out to the rest of the media.”

  As the deputies and crime scene specialists pored over the scene, Jim scanned the room. Next to one of the support columns he noticed a black handheld digital video camera mounted on a tripod. Jim walked over to the device.

  “Hey P.J., can you come take a look at something?”

  He came over to Jim to examine the camera.

  P.J. pressed the power button, but the LCD screen remained black except for the readout and a flashing empty battery symbol in the top right-hand corner. “No juice.”

  He continued to look over the device, discovering the cover for the camera’s flash memory card. He ejected the card and held it up. P.J. looked around the scene for Dixon.

  “I wonder if the local station has a card reader?”

  Jim chuckled. “Knowing Jeremiah and his ego, I’m betting he has one connected to a computer in his office somewhere so he could watch himself to see how wonderful he really was.”

  Jim got Melissa’s attention and the three of them found Jeremiah’s office, which clearly was the old office of the camp’s director before New Creation purchased the facility. The walls were bare except for a framed copy of the first article on New Creation.

  “Aww, we have a fan of our work.” Jim’s characteristic sarcasm was in full force.

  “Let’s get to work, shall we.” P.J. sat in the fairly new black mesh office chair, turned on the Dell laptop on the desk and inserted the memory card into the reader. Jim and Melissa clustered behind him.

  Once the Microsoft Windows start-up logo dissolved, the desktop icons appeared on the monitor. P.J. opened the short-cut link to the computer’s hard drive. A list of file names appeared, which included software and application files in addition to “Billing,” “Correspondence,” “Personal” and “Sermons.”

  Jim pointed to the screen. “Click on ‘Sermons’.”

  “OK.” P.J. moved his middle finger over the laptop’s mouse track pad and clicked on the mouse button with this thumb.

  As the file opened up, they noticed each month had a subfolder.

  “There are no folders for anything past December,” Melissa noted.

  “Hmm,” Jim replied. “The month’s not over yet, but maybe he knew he wouldn’t be here come January.”

  “Maybe.”

  P.J. clicked on December and when those files opened up, he noticed each of them had a date followed by the file designation “.wmv”. It looked like he spoke to the group every day. P.J. selected the file for December 17, one week before Christmas Eve. The Windows Media Player program launched as the video loaded up.

  The first two minutes of the video showed people talking in small groups. Jeremiah then walked up to the front of the room where there was a small lectern he placed his notes on. The image on the camera zoomed until he filled the center of the screen. After some introductory comments, he stared straight into the camera and led the group in a song. P.J., Jim and Melissa were transfixed by the simple lyrics.

  My Shepherd

  You are My Shepherd

  My Shepherd

  You are My Shepherd

  I Obey You

  I Listen to my Shepherd

  I Obey You

  I Listen to my Shepherd alone

  “They’re singing about Jeremiah!” Melissa gasped.

  Jim’s eyes went wide. “That’s just creepy.”

  “Let’s see what their Christmas Eve service was like,” P.J. said as he clicked on the memory card icon.

  The image that filled the screen, which was shot from a different angle than its predecessor, included the Christmas tree off to the left of the screen along with a folding card table that held some of the cups they had found earlier.

  Jeremiah entered the scene and led the group in two Christmas carols. Yet unlike the singing before, Jim noticed only a handful of voices could be heard, and there were fewer people in the audience than the previous meeting. Even before they finished singing, Jim noted Jeremiah looked frustrated with the lackluster participation, which was a far cry from the enthusiastic response he had received when the reporters first heard him speak earlier that year.

  Unlike the last video, Jeremiah looked off-screen as he b
egan his message.

  “He’s not looking at the camera this time,” Jim said. “I wonder if he even remembers the camera is on?”

  “Maybe not,” P.J. replied. “Let’s see what he has to say.”

  21

  “What wrong with you?’ Jeremiah scolded the audience as he began his message. “Have you lost the faith? Have your lost your way? Have you forgotten who made it possible for you to gain your freedom from the things that trapped you in your former lives? What are you thinking?

  “Some have foolishly left the fold and I know others of you are thinking of doing the same. I have heard the poor excuses: ‘We don’t need Shepherd Jeremiah! We can be clean and sober on our own!’ Do you really think that’s possible? Do you really think you can make it without me? Don’t you know none of you are anything without me?

  “I know it sounds appealing. You think you can leave the New Creation Community in our pristine mountains, return to the polluted world below and be OK. You tell yourselves you have the positive power within you and nothing will hurt you. Before you know it, you’ll be back in that crack house or on that street corner. You’ll fall again and you won’t be able to stop yourselves. Like it says in Proverbs, ‘As a dog returns to its vomit, so a fool repeats his foolishness’. Without my guidance you are fools. You need me to remain strong!

  “Those who have left our community already have sinned against me and those who are thinking of leaving are committing sinful thoughts in your heart. You need to be forgiven. You need to be made clean again. One thing the church has always done when people wanted to show their dedication to the faith was communion, and we have some juice here today for that very purpose.

  “But before we partake, you need to ask for forgiveness for your sins and you need to do it publicly. I need everyone to say, ‘Please forgive me, Shepherd Jeremiah’.”

  A few audience members uttered the phrase.

  Anger filled his voice as he spoke again. “What was that? I thought you wanted to be forgiven? You can’t be forgiven by just thinking the words. You actually need to say them!” Jeremiah took a breath before continuing. “Now, let’s try that again. Say ‘Please forgive us, Shepherd Jeremiah’.”