Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (22 page)

    
He
propped his elbows on her partition. “It seems completely far-fetched,” he
said, “but I’m not discounting that the Witnesses could be involved on some
esoteric level. Not Silas. Not her father. But one of the other elders struck
me as a little ‘off,’ psychosexually speaking: the senior Overseer, Amos Leach.
Just a feeling.”

    
“You
know, Raszer . . . hold on . . . ” She made a flurry of keystrokes, then turned
to pull a file from the cabinet behind her. “There’ve been a bunch of pedophile
claims made against the church over the last few years by ex-members. One or two
prosecutions, I think.”

    
“Check
it out.”

    
“By the
way,” she said. “You’ll have to make that nap a short one. Your Detective
Aquino called. You’re scheduled to interview the Parrish boy and his mother at
two this afternoon. After that, he’ll take you to the evidence locker.”

    
“Great,”
said Raszer. “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”

    
“Who
said that? Hunter Thompson?”

    
“No,
that’s Warren Zevon, too,” Raszer explained. “And he is dead. Sadly.”

    
“Yeah,”
said Monica, eyeing his bare torso. “Now get out of here before you begin to
distract me.”

    
“One
more thing.”

    
“Uh-huh?”

    
“When
you have a minute, update our list of freelance pilots operating out of New
Orleans or South Florida. The real cowboys. Ex-CIA and the like—the guys who
can thread the needle.”

    
“Planning
a trip?”

    
“Not
me,” he replied. “I’ll explain. Right now, I need to soak my head.”

    
Under
the scalding hot shower, the buzzing in Raszer’s head returned. He steadied
himself against the turquoise tiles that lined the inside wall of the bath.
Sunlight spilled through the little window above, and he squeezed his eyes shut
in an effort to attenuate the pain it caused him. His pupils were fully
dilated.

    
The
buzzing was a low-voltage hum, like that heard and felt in the vicinity of a
power transformer. He’d become aware of it during an earlier investigation, the
one that had taken the life of his partner, April, and now he seemed to be
stuck with it. At low volume, it came across as continuous and of a single
frequency, but when it got loud, he was able to make out discrete but very
rapid pulses, and sometimes other frequencies. Its nature was electronic, of
that there was no doubt, and he’d been concerned enough to have himself scanned
for brain clots and tumors. It wasn’t until he’d related the buzz to the activity
in his right eye that he’d finally made some peace with it. Raszer was slow to
come to such things. As acutely in tune with the external environment as he
was, he had a blind spot with regard to events in his own body.

    
Years
before, while Raszer was earning his PI license via a stint with the LAPD
Missing Persons Unit, a young FBI agent assigned to an interstate
child-abduction case had noticed Raszer’s uncanny ability to map out routes
that, more often than not, turned out to be the ones fugitives took, and had
given Raszer a battery of tests designed to reveal “remote viewing” abilities.
Raszer’s scores were only slightly above the average. He was not clairvoyant.

    
It was
something else.

    
With no
native talent for either mathematics or chess, he was nonetheless able to “see”
probabilities collapsing into events in time and in varying potential
realities, and could adjust his forecasted outcomes as the factors influencing
them changed. This odd faculty was at its most keen when the flaw in his eye was
“active.” The knack seemed to apply only to human beings, and particularly to
human beings in the exercise of their desire. He could not have employed it at
the craps table, except possibly to psych out the croupier.

    
Now he
wasn’t sure what the buzzing signified, except that it had started when Layla
Faj-Ta’wil had laid her head on his chest at 5:00
am
and said,
“If I could make a different world, you would be my pretty man and I would be
your woman.”

    
Aquino was waiting in front of the Parrish house, a
run-down bungalow on the south end of Azusa. The house had the look of a
long-absent father, and Aquino had the look of a man on his way to someplace
else. He shook Raszer’s hand and grunted.

    
“The
mother doesn’t like me,” he said, gesturing over his shoulder. “I don’t think
she likes anybody much. You’ll see why when you talk to the kid . . . if you
can talk to him.”

    
“What’s
the history here?” Raszer asked. Storm clouds were still parked along the high
peaks of the back range, but on the L.A. Basin side, the sky was clear blue.

    
“The
boy’s father was ‘disfellowshipped’ by the JWs a couple years back, after he
had a fling with the church secretary. Apparently, he didn’t repent properly,
and so the wife and son were ordered to ‘shun’ him. Tough on a marriage, I
would think. After six months of that, the guy split, and Mrs. Parrish—Grace is
her name—blamed the breakup on the elders. Made such a stink that they
disfellowshipped her, too, along with the boy, who was already running with
Johnny Horn.” Aquino spat on the ground. “Like I mentioned before, the kid’s
had mental problems from early on. Asperger’s syndrome, they call it.”

    
“Hmm,”
said Raszer. “That’s interesting.”

    
“Why?”

    
“I dunno
yet,” Raszer answered. “Could be a link.”

    
“Like a
‘walking autism,’ I’m told by the experts,” said Aquino. “At least, he
was
walking until he saw his buddies
killed. Now he mainly sits in his room in his underwear with the shades pulled,
says nothing. The mother waits on him like he’s some invalid. Be prepared. It’s
weird in there, and the kid doesn’t seem to bathe.”

    
Raszer
cast a glance toward the ramshackle front porch.

    
“Has he
been treated?” he asked. “Is he on meds?”

    
“He saw
shrinks while the investigation was in process,” said Aquino, “but now, I don’t
think so. I’ve urged the mother to get him help, but old habits die hard with
the JWs—even ex-JWs. They don’t like psychiatrists. I’ll tell you, Mr. Raszer,
they are the most closed-in people I’ve ever seen. Germs grow in closed
places.”

    
Raszer
nodded. “You ever come across any of these allegations of child abuse or
pedophilia involving Witness families?”

    
“Not
personally,” Aquino replied, “but I’m aware of them. The problem is, it all
stays inside. Under church law, you can’t accuse a man without two witnesses,
and where’s the second witness to an act of sexual abuse?” He pulled his car
keys from his pocket. “Anyhow, Grace is waiting for you inside. I told her
you’re a nice guy. When you’re done, come over to the station and I’ll take you
over to Evidence.”

    
“Thanks,
Detective,” said Raszer. “Any word from the Horns or the Lees?”

    
“They’re
even less anxious to talk than this one. But I’m trying. If all else fails,
we’ll pay them a cold call.”

    
Grace
Parrish was a fragile, tubercular-looking woman with long hair braided down to
her midback. She might have been pretty once. In spite of the strain, her skin
was still unlined, except around her mouth, which seemed frozen in the clench
of someone suppressing tears. Raszer made her out to be about thirty-eight,
which meant she’d borne her only son young and then quit. There was probably a
story in that.

    
She led
Raszer into a sparsely furnished living room where all the seat cushions were
vinyl covered. In the corner was a La-Z-Boy recliner that must have been her
husband’s; Raszer could still see the impression of his body in the imitation
leather. On the white walls, Raszer counted the grimy stencils of half a dozen
removed picture frames, probably family photos, possibly of church-related
occasions. Mrs. Parrish sat down to an unfinished cup of tea, the Lipton’s tag
still hanging over the chipped rim, and motioned Raszer to a faded yellow
armchair.

    
“Thank
you, Mrs. Parrish,” he said, “for letting me stop by. I’m sure Detective Aquino
told you I’m investigating Katy Endicott’s disappearance.”

    
She took
a sip of tea and held the cup just beneath her chin. “You’re working for
them
.”
Her gray eyes had been aimed into the cup until she’d said the
word
them
.

    
“You
mean the Kingdom Hall,” said Raszer. “No, to be accurate, I’m working for a
father who lost a daughter. The church . . . has agreed to lend its
assistance.”

    
“Ha!”
she blurted, and set the teacup down hard. She coughed, and continued. “The
only thing they want is to get their property back.”

    
“What do
you mean by that?”

    
“I mean
nothing,” she said. “Absolutely nothing.”

    
Her
voice had the ragged quality of someone continually swallowing back stomach
acid, but there was a sweetness and docility in it, too, Raszer thought. She
must once have been a good parishioner, a “wise and faithful slave.”

    
“I sense
there’s not much love lost between you and the elders,” he said.

    
“Why
should there be?” she said. “They drove both my husband and my son away. They
just couldn’t keep their fingers out of it. None of it.”

    
“You
mean your personal life?”

    
“I mean
everything,” she said, and now Raszer could taste the bile in her throat. “My
kids, my home, my kitchen . . . my bedroom. What to read, what to watch, what
to think. It’s like an infes . . . an infes . . . ” She swallowed. “An infestation.
You don’t see it until it’s gone, and you’re left with nothing.”

    
“What
about your faith?” Raszer asked.

    
“What
about it?”

    
“Do you
still have that, or did they drive that away, too?”

    
“That’s
a funny question for a private detective to ask,” she said.

    
“Why
don’t you and I begin here by admitting that we don’t know anything about each
other, so we have everything to learn? I’m not here to grill you, Mrs. Parrish.
I’m here to try and understand what happened to your son, so that I can
understand what might’ve happened to Katy Endicott.”

    
“The
only thing I have faith in, Mr. . . .
Razor
,
is it?”

    
“Yeah.
R-a-s-z-e-r
. But you said it right.”

    
“ . . .
Is that things can’t get any worse.”

    
“Well,
your son is alive,” Raszer said softly. “Are you at all close to the other
families? The Horns or the Lees or . . . what was the other boy’s name?”

    
“Strunk,”
she said, almost in a whisper. “Joey Strunk. He was Emmett’s friend. He had
dinner at my table at least once a week . . . till all this craziness happened.
I talk to his mom, poor thing. The others, no. You see, Mr. Raszer, once the
Witnesses shun you, you stay shunned. They made us invisible. The Horns and the
Lees, they never stood up for us. Never even stood up for their own
children—until it was too late.”

    
“So
through all of this,” Raszer said, “you never had contact with the church.”

    
“We’re
apostates
,” she said, and wiped two
fingers across her brow. “Like we’ve got triple sixes on our foreheads.” Grace
Parrish paused to take a sip of cold tea. “At least I’ve got my memories of a
time before the Witnesses, and sometimes I can grope my way down the hallway by
those. That boy in there . . . ”

    
She
turned to stare at the closed bedroom door behind her left shoulder. A big
black
X
had been spray-painted on it.

    
“My
son,” she said. “He doesn’t know how to live in the world. He doesn’t have any
memories, except for seeing his father leave and his friends killed. The one
time he stepped outside the church, all hell came down—just like they said it
would. He blames me. He shuns
me
.
If they’d have him back, if I’d
let them
have him back, he’d probably
run . . . ” She tightened her lips until the blood had been squeezed out, and
then released the words: “ . . . right back into their arms.”

    
Grace
dropped her head into her hand and began to weep. Raszer leaned forward,
wanting to go to her side but not wanting to violate the sanctuary of her
grief.