Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (11 page)

    
Johnny
Horn stood almost a full head taller than his compadre Henry Lee. His head was
shaved to the scalp, and his blue eyes made the pixels in the digitized image
spin like dervishes. Even in sweltering August, he wore a long-sleeved flannel
shirt, but it hid neither his steroid-pumped physique nor the Osama bin Laden
T-shirt he wore beneath. Judging from his eyes and coiled, predatory bearing,
Raszer pegged him as a meth freak. He was formidable, the clear focus of the
family portrait.

    
“They
send him off to fight Islamic terrorists,” Aquino said, “and he comes back one
of them. No wonder we’re losing the war.”

    
“You
said it yourself, Detective. Some boys eat what they kill.” Raszer studied the
face and peeled away its onionskin of punk rage. “I doubt the T-shirt says much
about his political sentiments, other than
fuck
you
. That guy’s too amped up on his own revelation to be anybody’s sleeper
agent. You know, Detective, there’s a long history of Christian soldiers
marching off to war and coming back transformed by their encounter with the
alien. That was partly the story with the Crusades. Maybe Johnny looked through
the scope and saw himself. Maybe he saw his father and knew—after he’d pulled
the trigger, anyway—that the ordinary life was over for him.”

    
“Well,
anyway,” said Aquino, “it is now.”

    
To
Johnny Horn’s left stood Katy Endicott, the only one of the four not looking at
the camera. She was looking up at Johnny, but whether with unreserved adoration
or
what do we do now, Johnny?
uncertainty
wasn’t clear. The shadow of his big shoulder fell over her eyes, but the cant
of her chin suggested a little of both. Having met her father, another towering
figure with a zealot’s eyes, another man whose certitude had left her little
personal autonomy, it was not difficult for Raszer to read the body language of
a devotee. The language said, “Whither thou goest, I will go.”

    
She was
petite, presumably from her mother’s side, with long brown hair pinned back.
She wore—of all things to wear to an orgy of desecration—a simple print dress,
hemmed just above the knees. She was a pretty girl, maybe even exceptionally
so, but it wasn’t the mimetic prettiness of the girls down in
twee
San Marino, much less of the mall
queens in Sherman Oaks. Two things distinguished her immediately. Like her
father, Katy Endicott was an anachronism. Her slim, delicate form could have
been cut from the photograph and pasted into one fifty years older without the
slightest temporal dissonance. And there was, in the tilt of her head, the
parted lips, and the woozy drape of her forearm, a languor, like that of a
young novitiate awaiting her first nocturnal encounter with the Holy Spirit,
her body an empty vessel of sacrament .

    
“She
doesn’t seem the type, does she?” said Aquino.

    
“No,”
said Raszer. “And then again, yes. Something…missing.”

    
Aquino
blinked. “Well, not like the sister, anyway. That one’s a pistol.”

    
And
Ruthie was. For a few ticks, Raszer could not remove his eyes from the outline
of Katy’s face, but once he did, a number of things became clear. The
redheaded, nose-ringed, midriff-baring blur that was Ruthie Endicott flashed
alter ego
like a pop-up window. Even out
of focus, all that was absent in Katy was aggressively present in Ruthie; all
that was formless was flesh. How could a little sister, in this day and age,
not
have wanted to follow her down the
rabbit hole?
A sweet sickness
, Silas
had called her. To Raszer, she looked like rhubarb pie too good to spoil with
vanilla ice cream.

    
In the
subsequent photos, arranged in Detective Aquino’s surmise of sequence, Ruthie
more than rose to her persona. She lifted her halter top for a low-angle shot
that could only have been taken from between her legs, spray-painted the white
wall with pentagrams, and sucked on a baby pacifier while being taken from the
rear by Henry Lee. Although the grainy photo was not anatomically revealing,
Raszer could only assume that Henry—if he had indeed been without testicles at
the time of the photo—was one of those geldings who could still get it up.

    
From the
accounts given by Silas and the Overseers, Raszer had taken Johnny and Ruthie
to be the former high school sweethearts, but the Polaroids suggested that at
least a passing change of partners had occurred. In every shot featuring Katy,
it was Johnny Horn her eyes sought out: Johnny defacing bibles, Johnny torching
a pile of Watchtower newsletters in the middle of the floor, Johnny spraying
Nothing Is True . . .
on the wall behind
the lectern—and, in the photo that must have turned the walls of Silas
Endicott’s heart to paper, shirtless Johnny resting the black rock on Katy’s
head as she, on her knees, took him in her mouth.

    
All the
sex play and schoolyard Satanism notwithstanding, the most transgressive photo
was the last, taken when the quartet’s work was done, and again on a timer so
that all could be duly credited members of this latter-day Clyde Barrow Gang.
This time, the sisters stood side by side, flanked by the boys, with Henry the
one to dash into frame at the last second (Raszer could not imagine Johnny
hustling for anything but his own call to arms). The wall behind them was black
with pentagrams and triple sixes, skater glyphs, and slogans, some of which
evidenced surprising wit:

    
144,000 IDIOTS CAN’T BE WRONG.

    
HERE GATHER JEHOVAH’S
WITLESS.

    
THERE IS NO GOD BUT CHAOS,
AND JOHNNY JIHAD IS HIS PROPHET.

    
NOTHING
IS TRUE. EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED.

    
Also
featured was Aleister Crowley’s
DO WHAT THOU
WILT SHALL BE THE WHOLE OF THE LAW
—known
and misunderstood by every Luciferian punter and surfer of magickal websites.
The psychological basis of most of this stuff was as clear as the sneer on a
misfit boy’s face or the simmering resentment of a cast-off daughter, and for
these and other reasons, Raszer felt sure that most of the handiwork was
Ruthie’s and Henry’s. There was one strikingly original touch, however, that
felt like Katy’s, and it made Raszer’s scalp tingle with precognition.

    
The
sisters had exchanged outfits for the final shot. Ruthie stood doe-eyed and
satirically demure in Katy’s dress, glance averted and hem raised in a vulgar
curtsy. Despite the face jewelry and the butcher-chopped hair, it was the
dead-on impression of a near twin. Katy, in Ruthie’s low-rise jeans and halter,
had slung her hips out, made her eyes up like a dime-store vamp’s, and had both
arms wrapped around Henry Lee’s naked waist. A wardrobe change and a little
mascara, and she was Salome. The only thing left of her reticence was a
downcast stare and the sweet sweep of her cheekline.

    
Aquino
turned to Raszer. “I’d have a stroke, too, if she was my daughter.”

    
“Well,”
said Raszer, “I’ll grant you that none of these kids look fit for the choir,
but whether it’s Hollywood or Des Moines, they’re all good at playing bad
nowadays. It’s the new normal. Hell, they do it on the Disney Channel. Would
you mind printing me a copy of the first and last pictures—the group shots? And
if you’ve got a more conventional photo of Katy—yearbook, whatever—I could use
that, too.”

    
“Sure
thing,” said Aquino, switching on his printer. “I’ll give you the one that’s
gone out to all the law-enforcement and social-services people.”

    
“The
thing is,” Raszer continued, “what do we
really
have here? Sex, sedition, and sacrilege. It’s not pretty, but you can see how
four kids—brought up in a radically conservative sect that tells them all but
144,000 of the chosen are damned—might act out in some pretty transgressive
ways, especially when three of them are kicked off the reservation and the
fourth—Katy—watches her sister run off to Taos to do all the bad things she
can’t. A year—almost a year and a half—later, we’ve got rape, execution-style
murder, and kidnapping. What’s the connection?”

    
“Well,”
Aquino said defensively, “we haven’t made it yet. We’re just small-town cops,
Mr. Raszer. Maybe a sophisticated thinker like yourself—”

    
“C’mon,
Detective,” said Raszer. “Azusa’s small-town, but you’re not. You’re a sharp
and determined guy. You must have had theories.”

    
“As many
as you can shake a stick at,” said Aquino. “First we thought drugs, like you
said. Johnny and Henry were dealing. Meth, ketamine, PCP . . . they even had
tanks of nitrous up there. And there’s evidence that Katy continued using even
while the Witnesses had her on, uh, probation.”

    
“And
could the limo guys’ve been old-guard drug lords or gangbangers, fighting a
turf war over the foothills with this self-made potentate in his mountain
stronghold? Azusa’s not all that far from Compton. Could Johnny’s customer base
have grown fast enough to threaten suppliers with enough margin to afford
chauffeured Lincolns?”

    
“Nah.
Didn’t pan out. But in a related area, he might have been a threat.”

    
“What’s
that?” Raszer asked.

    
“Prostitution.
One of the girls questioned at the rave gave us the tip. We followed it up,
found out Johnny had four or five female disciples, ages seventeen to
twenty-one, hooking for him. He’d send them out fishing down in the flats . . .
Upland, La Verne, as far east as San Bernardino. The amazing thing was, Mr.
Raszer, he had them doing it for the cause. For his ‘war chest.’ None of these
local girls made more than milk money.”

    
“Was
Katy Endicott one of the girls?”

    
“Nobody’s
gone on record with that,” said Aquino. “But it’s possible.”

    
“Okay.
Interesting
,” said Raszer. “That may
explain the JWs’ theory that Katy was bartered into some kind of white-slavery
ring. But still, putting four or five girls on the street wouldn’t ordinarily
get you killed. And it’s not likely these thugs were interceding to prevent or
even avenge a rape. They don’t sound like white knights to me.”

    
“Unless
. . . ”

    
“Unless
what?” Raszer asked.

    
Aquino’s
modesty kept his self-satisfaction in check, but just barely. “Unless this
particular sex ring was after girls who hadn’t been spoiled.”

    
Raszer
began to nod slowly. “Virgins,” he said. A volley of hail hit the window like a
spray of rock salt. “Was she?” he asked.

    
“At
least until that night, she was,” Aquino replied. “If we can believe Emmett
Parrish. Emmett called her ‘the last pure thing.’ Of course, we have no way of
confirming that.”

    
“The last pure thing,”
Raszer repeated.
“And that night . . . was there evidence of actual penetration? Condoms? Katy’s
blood or fluids on any of the boys?”

    
“The
short answer is no,” said Aquino, handing Raszer a folder containing the photo
printouts. “But this is where it gets foggy. And I mean that both ways. All we
have is Emmett, and he’s back there in the bushes with an obstructed view.
Henry and the other boy are holding Katy down on the trunk. Johnny is first up.
He’s the only one who had a shot, and the only one found with his dick out.
Emmett
thinks
he raped her, but the
physical evidence suggests otherwise. There was no vaginal fluid, no tissue, no
blood, and the only ejaculate we found was all over the trunk. You see, Mr.
Raszer, he ejaculated when his neck was snapped, same time as he shit himself.”

    
“Uh-huh,”
said Raszer.

    
“That’s
about it,” said Aquino. “As far as we know, Katy may have left intact.”

    
Raszer
looked out the window. Fog was coming down, and he had at best a scant two
hours of light. Without shifting his gaze from the mountains, he asked, “Are
you a fan of alternate histories, Detective?”

    
“How do
you mean?”

    
“It’s a
style of fiction,” said Raszer. “I guess they’d call it sci-fi at the
bookstore. Anyhow, what the writer does is take some historical event and
extrapolate what might’ve happened if just one or two little things had gone
differently. Say, Hitler got the bomb before we did, or Linda Kasabian called
the cops before the killing started.”

    
“Okay,”
said Aquino. “I’m with you.”

    
“Well,
let’s suppose your virgin theory is right. And let’s imagine the Lincoln got
stuck in the mud and arrived ten minutes late. The gangbang goes on as planned,
and it’s plain as day to the kidnappers that Katy Endicott has been defiled.
What happens?”