Caesar and Sofia had the basement of a narrow house in the Mission. Alex could see the yard through the kitchen window, sunless and damp. The couple had filled the space with pots, but the plants within were wilting.
PD shook his head when Caesar offered him a beer and Sofia poured them coffee instead, the smell chasing away the lingering scent of tomatoes from the room. This was the couple's home but they didn't look at home here. Something more essential than the plants had died in the spirit of the place.
Alex leaned her chin on her hand and watched PD as he stretched his long legs beneath the table. "Tell me about Maria," he said. He nodded across the room at a framed photo of a dark-haired, almond-eyed teenager. "Is that her? She's very beautiful."
Sofia's face softened for the first time. "She is. So beautiful. She could have been a model, I always told her so, but she wanted to be a nurse. She had a heart the size of the earth, that one. She thought she could heal the world. But you don't want to hear this - what do you care about my little girl?"
PD rested his fingers against the woman's. "I have to be honest with you, we're part of an organisation that debunks cults. That's why Alex was there. Know thy enemy, you understand?"
Caesar leaned forward. "This is true? You're working against the Croatoans, trying to stop them?"
PD gave Sofia's hand a final squeeze as he let go. "Yes. So anything you can tell us about them would be great."
Caesar rubbed his back, wincing as he rose to his feet. "It's easier to show you. Here."
He returned to the table with a photo album. The cover was that bobbled fake leather which seemed designed to catch dust, but there was none on this. It was obvious the couple looked at it frequently, probably daily.
Sofia flicked it open. The first page was one big photo, a baby too young to smile held in the arms of a woman who must have been Sofia, but looked forty years younger. "She was born July 4th, 1988," Sofia said. "We thought it was lucky, a sort of blessing - we called her our little Miss America. "
Caesar gently took the book from her and flipped forward through nearly three-quarters of its width. "They don't want to see that. I'm sorry, it's just, we..." his words trailed into silence and Alex saw him swallow twice.
"I understand," PD said. "Tell me about the last few months, just before Maria joined the Croatoans - and just after."
Caesar swallowed a final time and nodded, flipping forward a couple more pages in the album. "This was her twenty-first birthday party. That was the day before she - before she walked into that place."
Maria was instantly recognisable, glowing in the centre of the photo surrounded by laughing young women. She was dressed in jeans and a blue blouse, and she had rosy cheeks and a glowing white smile. The small gap between her front teeth only made her seem more appealing, an endearingly human flaw.
"She
was
beautiful," Alex murmured.
Sofia glared at her. "She
is
beautiful. She still is."
"But she's different," Caesar said. He flipped through a few more pages and Alex saw more pictures of the party and a few other casual shots that looked like they'd been taken at a park somewhere, maybe Golden Gate.
"We went out the next day for a family picnic," Sofia said. "It was one of those spring days when the sun shines and the wind doesn't blow. It was perfect. And then..."
"She went for a walk on her own. She said she wanted to see the city before she left. She was going to go to UCLA, you see - a scholarship." Even through the pain in Caesar's voice, Alex could hear the pride. "This was her last weekend in the city. She'd gotten a job in her uncle's store in Modesto and she planned to work there a couple months, save some money."
PD leaned back, folding his arms. "But she never went." There was a tight muscle jumping in his jaw. Alex could tell he thought this was important and couldn't imagine why. It was horrible, but it was what cults did. They took people away from their families. They changed them.
It was what PD and Hammond were doing to her.
Caesar flipped to the next page in the album and suddenly she wondered. The woman staring back at them was obviously Maria - the gap between her front teeth was the same. But nothing else about her was recognisable, from the sophisticated designer clothes to the slightly stiff way she held her body.
"When was that photo taken?" she asked, her voice tight.
Sofia nodded, as if satisfied with her reaction. "That's a month after she walked into the Croatoan centre. It was the first time we saw her after she left."
"She never came back from that walk," Caesar said. "We reported her missing and the next day we got a phone call from her, telling us that she was fine, not to worry. Those bastards, they must have links to the cops. They knew we'd made the report and they didn't want any trouble. They wanted to keep us quiet."
"But we wouldn't let it go," Sofia said, a sort of bitter pride in her voice. Alex could imagine her at the precinct day after day, never making a scene but not letting them brush her off, either, driving the officers crazy.
"We thought she'd been kidnapped, you understand," Caesar said. "We thought someone had a gun to her head when she told us she was all right."
PD nodded. "But then you found out the truth..."
"The police gave us her address eventually," Sofia said. "Just to shut us up."
As she spoke, Caesar flipped over the next page to a picture of a mansion in what looked like the Hollywood Hills. There was a high fence surrounding the property and he must have used a telephoto lens to get the shot. Alex wondered how much he'd spent on the camera and whether he was still paying off the debt. At the back of the house she could see a blue smudge which might have been a swimming pool.
"That's her house," Caesar said. "Our Maria's."
"Forgive me," PD said, "but are you telling me she bought it?"
"They gave it to her," Sofia said. "The Croatoans, just two weeks after she joined them."
Alex sat up straighter. "Hang on. You're saying that the cult
gave
her money? That... that doesn't make any sense."
Caesar flicked through the remaining pages of the album, all of them containing photos clearly taken at a distance without the subject's consent. He'd been stalking his own daughter, but Alex didn't blame him. The woman in the photos bore so little resemblance to their child: eating at top-of-the-range restaurants with a mix of beautiful people her own age and moneyed men and women two generations older; at a movie premier, stepping out of a limo; attending what appeared to be a polo match.
"We don't know any of these people," Sofia said, looking at the last photo, a picture of Maria at some society function. "Maria didn't either. Three months ago, she would have been cleaning their houses to pay her way through college and they wouldn't even have noticed she was alive."
"We know what cults are," Caesar said. "They con people out of their money."
Sophia reached across the table, grasping Alex's palm in one hand and PD's wrist in the other. "So you tell us, please. What did our little girl do for those people to be given all this in return?"
Working for a covert government agency had one advantage, Alex thought sourly. If you wanted to violate someone's fourth amendment rights, they were the go-to guys. It only took two phone calls with Hammond to track Maria down to an upscale restaurant near the Bay Bridge. Apparently, Maria was stopping off in the city after a visit to her winery in Sonoma - another part of her vast and inexplicable new fortune.
"I don't see why I have to be the one to do this," Alex said as they waited to be seated. "You're a better liar than I am."
He raised an eyebrow.
"Oh come on," she said. "You've got that whole blank-faced, inscrutable Indian thing going on. I can never tell what you're thinking."
"I'm thinking you're near Maria's age. She's not going to believe she used to be at middle school with me."
"Except, you know, that I wasn't at school with her either, and she won't remember me."
"She'll be too embarrassed to admit it. Kid, take it from a good liar, the secret is confidence. It doesn't matter what you say, just say it like you believe it."
He lapsed into silence as their server approached, smiling as he led them through the restaurant. Dim lighting reflected warmly from the wood-panelled walls.
"She's there," PD said, nodding at one of the better tables near the windows overlooking the Bay. "The man next to her is Jacob Marriott. He's old New England money. I don't have any intel on the other two, but it's even odds they're Croatoans too."
The nameless couple were blonde and blandly pretty, around Maria's age but from a different social class altogether. Jacob Marriott was far older, improbably dark-haired and with the over-tight skin of a man who'd had too much plastic surgery. Alex had seen his face before beside Maria's in Caesar and Sophia's photos. She made to rise, but PD put a restraining hand on her arm.
"Food first," he said.
"I'm not hungry." She felt like she'd been living on adrenaline for several days.
"You don't need to eat much, just this."
He pushed a small packet across the table and she realised with an unpleasant lurch in her stomach that it was peyote. She darted a nervous glance around to see if they were being observed and closed her fist around the packet but didn't draw it any closer.
"Funny," she said, "you didn't mention this earlier."
His expression softened. "You'll be safe. It's public and I'm watching. There are no bad memories here to colour the spirit world."
Her fingers tightened round the drug, crushing the flakes of cactus into a fine powder. "Don't you think she might notice I'm as high as a kite?"
"Take half the packet. The lighting's dim so she won't be able to see your eyes. Just keep it short. I want to know what you see, not what you hear."
Alex nodded numbly as the waiter approached and didn't protest when PD ordered for both of them. They sat in silence until the food arrived, PD's eyes on the table and hers on Maria. The other woman seemed to be enjoying herself, chatting with her companions. She looked at ease - not like she was there under duress.
Alex jerked her eyes away when their food arrived. PD had ordered soup for her. The flakes of peyote were barely visible, brown flecks in the red, but the bitter after-taste lingered in her throat each time she swallowed.
She felt PD watching her as their main course arrived, lamb shank for him and fish for her. It was served whole and she saw its eye blinking up at her accusingly.
I've
died for you
, it seemed to say,
and you aren't even enjoying me
. Its mouth gulped open, drowning in air, and when she looked up PD nodded. She didn't know what her expression was but she knew he'd understood it.
"It's started," he said.
She felt the pressure of claws against her shoulder and the warm weight of a body. She knew what she'd see if she turned her head, but she chose not to. "There are no beginnings," Raven said in her ear.
"I'm ready," she told PD.
It was the coyote's face that stared back at her as he said, "You look OK, just try to blink a bit more. Go on - she's finished her dessert. They'll be going soon."
Her chair seemed to float away from her as she pushed it back and she was vaguely aware that it had toppled over, but she didn't try to lift it. She was afraid she might fall down beside it. Her body felt both weightless and profoundly heavy. She had to stand and think carefully for a minute before she remembered which muscles she needed to tense in order to walk. She saw a figure moving away from her, hurrying to the door. His curly brown hair bounced against the collar of his shirt, and she thought about calling out to him, but realised that she didn't want him to turn around. She sighed in relief when he disappeared from sight.
Time moved in fits and starts. Her foot inched forward and when it came down she was standing beside Maria's table. She tried to look at the young woman and felt a physical ache in her face as she attempted to wrench her gaze to the side. She couldn't do it. She knew if she did she'd see Maria's true face, and that was too horrible to contemplate. She looked at Jacob Marriott instead.
"Hi," she said. Her voice sounded odd, as if it was coming from a long way away. "Sorry to interrupt your meal."
"Do I know you?" His accent was refined but the face behind his human facade was feral.
A wolf in sheep's clothing,
she thought.
"I know your friend," she said. "It's Maria Vargas, isn't it? We went to middle school together."
He frowned over at the young woman and Alex knew she should have looked at her too - that it would make more sense to say this to
her
- but she couldn't do it. Even thinking about it made a cold sweat prickle on her skin. In the corner of her eye she could see Maria's dark hair. She flinched away from it and looked at the blonde couple beside her. They reminded her of Ken and Barbie, plastic and perfect.
"Your face definitely looks familiar," Maria said.
"It's Alex," she said. She tensed her shoulders and legs and finally forced herself to turn towards her.
"Of course, I remember now. How lovely to run into you." Maria smiled and it was the most ghastly thing Alex had ever seen.
She'd only taken a small dose of the drug. The real world was still clear and in it Maria looked just as she'd been in her parents' photos, a beautiful young woman with almond eyes and a charming, gap-toothed smile.
In the spirit world, another face looked back. The skin stretched tight over the skull beneath, broken in places so the white bone shone through. Her hair was thin, grey and brittle. Patches of her scalp were bloody and bare where it had torn away.
In one socket, the bloodshot eyeball swivelled beneath a lidless brow. The other was a dark cavity. As Alex watched, a maggot crawled out of the hole, its blind white head swinging from side to side, searching for more flesh to burrow through.
"Memento mori," she said, remembering the medieval paintings she'd studied in her history of art class, the images of death hidden in scenes of decadence and luxury.