A Mighty Fortress (32 page)

The early afternoon-sun had reached its zenith, and downtown Wauchula looked deserted. A courthouse sat at the center of the town, and a rusty water tower jutted into an otherwise bleak, desolate skyline.
 

First Baptist Church was a gigantic red brick building not far from the center of town. Its center-point was a steeple that appeared to be the highest point in town, save possibly for the water tower. The center section of the church, which appeared to be the sanctuary, was flanked by flat, extended office space on both sides. The sprawling building was surrounded by a parking lot that rivaled the one at Raymond James Stadium.

I parked in the lot with the most cars, where I hoped to meet church staff. Across the parking lot, I saw a man in gloves unloading bags of mulch from a beat-up pickup truck. He looked too old to be doing that kind of work, but I got close and he didn’t seem to mind. His arms were taut with exploding tendons; his neck was rough from decades of the Florida sun.

“Can I give you a hand?” I asked, feeling bloated from lunch.

He wiped his brow with a rag stained from so much sweat it looked stained from oil. “I reckon that would be fine. What’s it gonna cost me, though?”

“Nothing,” I said.

I had the last ten bags of mulch out in a few minutes. He was dragging them, spreading them across a flowerbed surrounding the parking lot.

“You sure you don’t want nothing?” he asked.

“That was a favor, friend.”

“Not sure I’ve seen you before. You go to church here?”

I shook my head. “I’m down from Tampa, working.”

“What kind of work you do?”

“I’m a private investigator.”

He lowered his head and sighed. “I knew it wasn’t free.”

“Why do you say that?”

He used his hand to shield his eyes from the sun. “What would a private investigator be looking for in Wauchula? About the most exciting thing ever happens here is the fair.”

“Well, truth be told, I’m looking for a young woman. Preacher’s daughter.”

“This girl in trouble?” he asked.

I shrugged. “Maybe.”

“What kind?”

“She may be a witness to murder. Or a suspect.”

“Well, you come to the wrong church. Our pastor’s daughters are still in school and all three are accounted for as of this morning.”

“Good, I guess I can cross one off my list.” He was still thinking. I’d give him another minute. “Maybe you could tell me where to look for my girl.”

“About how old is she?”

“I’d guess twenty.”

He nodded and spat. “I don’t think the man you’re looking for is still a preacher.”

“Why do you say that?”

“It don’t matter none, but if we’re talking about the same girl, I wouldn’t recommend you paying her daddy a visit.”

“Why not?”

He stared back at the red brick sanctuary. “Why don’t you come inside for a while?”

The leathery man, whose named was Levi, led me into a long hallway cooled by the coldest air conditioner I’d felt in a while. We passed by a wall display with booklets on every aspect of life, from managing money to when to start dating to estate planning. Then we turned and walked down another hallway with offices on both sides. First, there was a door for a youth pastor, and then one for an associate pastor. Finally, we reached the one that said Senior Pastor.
 

Levi went in without a word and closed the door. He emerged a minute later, and told me the pastor would see me now. Then he walked away without giving me the chance to thank him again.
 

Inside the study, the pastor stood waiting to greet me with a professional smile and a firm handshake. He was a stout man a few inches short of six feet, learned and gray. He wore thick stylish glasses and casual clothes that reminded me of the portly guy who had prayed at Obama’s first inauguration. I returned the shake and told him my name.

“Good to meet you, Milo. I’m Pastor Jerry Harkin. Please call me Jerry.” He gestured for me take a seat, and took his own once I did. “Levi told me about your work. So you’re a private investigator?”

I reached into my wallet and took out my card. He read it and smiled. “Your license hasn’t expired, has it?”

“Not as far as I know.”

“I’m just playing with you. I’m sure it hasn’t. So, Levi said you may be looking for Bob Hunter’s daughter.”

“I don’t know a Bob Hunter.”

His chin was resting on two fingers, his thumbs moving in pensive circles. “And she may be in some kind of trouble?” He glanced at my card again.

“She may be a witness to a murder I was investigating.”

“Was?”

I nodded. “And am. It’s complicated.”

“So you’re still working the case?”

I nodded.

He leaned back and sighed. “And you said she’s in her early twenties?”

“That would be my guess. I saw her Sunday. That’s what she looked like to me.”

“You know anything else about her? What she does for a living?”

I inhaled slowly before I answered. “I guess you could say she’s in the adult entertainment industry.”

He shook his head and rubbed his eyes. “That sounds about right. There’ve been rumors in town for a while that Evangeline was working as a stripper in Tampa.”

“Evangeline?” I said. He stared into space as I repeated the name to myself.
Evangeline
. Eve-Evie. Eve-Angeline. Angie. Evangeline. Then, I repeated it aloud, “Evangeline?”

He nodded. “That’s right. Evangeline Hunter, but everyone called her Angel.”

I repeated her name again.

And he nodded again. “Bearer of good news. Like the Greek word for gospel, euangelion.”

I felt lightheaded. “I think we’re talking about the same girl.”

That prompted him to roll his head up. “Mr. Porter, I will gladly tell you anything you want to know about Angel Hunter, but I’m going to implore you to leave Bob Hunter out of this.”

“I really need to know where she might be. If you can tell me that, I have no reason to talk to her father. Otherwise, I need his address.”

“I can assure you, he doesn’t know where his daughter is.”

“How can you be sure?” I asked.

“I guess you can say he disowned her years ago, and he’s, well, I don’t know any other way to put it, but Bob Hunter isn’t in his right mind these days.” He lowered his head to make sure I’d registered that.

“And who is?”

He laughed. “Yes, who is? As a pastor, I can attest that we’re all sick; the mind is deceitful above all things. But I also know that mental disease exists, that it is a bona fide reality in a fallen world, and that it has gripped its awful hooks into Bob Hunter in the worst way.”

“Is that why he’s not a preacher anymore?”

“That’s one of the reasons.” He nodded a few times, as though choosing a path of explanation. “Let me tell you a little more about the Hunter family. Bob used to pastor down at Southern Pines Baptist. It’s a smaller church out in the country.”

“As opposed to here in the metropolis?”

“Fair enough, but drive by and you’ll get the picture.”

“I might just do that.”

“He had a good flock there, a healthy little church. A very nice family. Angel, his only child. And his wife, Betty. She was a sweet woman. An adorable family. I can still remember their family picture from about a decade ago.” He wiped his eye. “They’d always been told Betty couldn’t conceive, but the Lord knew better than the doctors, and gave them their Angel when Betty was almost forty. What followed was a tragedy. One of the things that, as a pastor, I struggle to explain to anyone.”

He wiped something from his eye and took a breath. “Betty, she developed breast cancer, I think when Angel was about twelve years old. There was a lot of support for her in this town. All the churches were getting together, praying, raising money. I remember the community came together, had a festival with all the music groups playing, really rocking out at the fairgrounds. It was great. I think altogether we raised almost $50,000 to help the family out. Southern Pines didn’t have Bob on a good plan, couldn’t afford it, and the insurance wasn’t helping much. She had a mastectomy, went through a lot of treatment; as you could imagine, it was really trying on her and the family. And it looked like we were going to have a very happy ending. After about six months, they had declared Betty to be cancer-free, totally in remission.” He paused ominously and looked deep in my soul.

“But it came back?” I asked weakly.

He nodded and closed his eyes. “With a vengeance, Mr. Porter. It spread quickly this time. They found it in her liver. In no time, it’d made its way to her lungs. She died within a few months. Angel was fourteen at the time.”

“And it broke her?”

“As you could imagine. Again, the community came together, supported that family. Prayed for them.” He sighed. “Myself and a few other pastors, we used to meet with Bob regularly to see how they were doing, how we could help them. He’d tell us about Angel and about how she was struggling. When she turned fifteen, he knew she was drinking and smoking pot and Lord only knows what else. He couldn’t get her to go to church. Most Sundays, he’d preach and she wouldn’t be there. When she was there, she’d create a scene. She’d disappear for days at a time, and it wasn’t long until she was running with men.
 

“That’s when Bob laid down the law. He was ready to break, too. I think he snapped one night. He went and he hit her, hit his own daughter. He told us what happened at one of our lunches. She came home after one of her trips. He asked her where she’d been, asked if she’d been with men. She screamed at him, told him she had and described in vivid detail what she’d done with those men, things I can’t repeat. She was sixteen then, and Bob broke down explaining it to us. He told her to ask God for forgiveness and a clean heart, and she started cursing God, saying there was no God who’d let her momma suffer the way she did. She screamed that her mom dying was the best thing that ever happened to her because she was free, free to do what she wanted, and that included having all the men she wanted, and there was nothing her daddy could do about it.

“Bob lost it then and there, and hit her. He should not have done that. I don’t mean to justify it. But you’d have to know Bob. He is a very quiet, reserved man. I’ve known him long enough to know. I think he’s always been haunted by demons. That was what brought him to the Lord in the first place—problems from the war, I think.”

I felt my gut twist. “Vietnam?”

He nodded. “Sniper. He never talked about it much, but three tours of duty. He volunteered for all of them.”

“So after he hit Angel?”

“Right, well, he lost her. DCF took her. She told them her dad hit her a lot, that he’d beaten her since Betty died. I don’t think that was true. But she was in foster homes for the next year or so, and then she turned eighteen. That’s when she moved to Tampa.
 

“Meanwhile, Bob was losing it. He just wasn’t himself. He wasted away to nothing, and it was then that he resigned. He told his church he couldn’t fulfill his duties. They were worried he felt disqualified, and they told him he’d made mistakes but they forgave him and wanted him to lead them. But he said no. He left.
 

“Not long after she turned eighteen, she sent him a postcard. Told him she was doing great and invited him to come up if he ever wanted to see her. She gave him an address. We prayed with Bob about it, and finally he decided to drive up there and see her and see if he couldn’t make amends. You know what? That address turned out to be for one of those strip clubs on Dale Mabry.” He nodded shamefully. “It was then that Bob finally disowned her. He said he never wanted to hear her name again unless she was in front of him on her knees, begging forgiveness.

“He told me that he was leaving ministry because he didn’t believe anymore. He didn’t believe in the power of prayer, didn’t believe in the power of the gospel to change people. He said men were beyond redemption.”

“So he lost his faith?”

Pastor Harkin nodded. “I check in on him from time to time, but I never mention her name. I always hold out hope that he’s going to mention her, or she’s going to come home, the prodigal son—or I guess prodigal daughter. I only hope she’s met by a joyful father running to meet her, if that ever happens.”

“You said he was a sniper in ’Nam?”

“That’s what I’ve heard. Never from him.”

“This anger he has. Suppose he were to learn that Angel was getting into prostitution, maybe even porn. If he found out about that, how do you think he would react?”

He shook his head and sighed. “It’s really hard to say, Mr. Porter. I just don’t know.”
 

“If he found the people who were bringing her down, do you think he would seek revenge?”

He took a breath and sighed. “I just don’t know what Bob Hunter would do these days.”

I took that as my cue to leave. “Pastor, I really appreciate your time today,” I said as I rose from my seat. “And I have to be honest: I can’t abide by your request to leave Bob out of this. I’m going to have to talk to him. I’ll do everything I can to make this as painless as possible for him.”

“Well, honestly, Mr. Porter, it’s not really Bob I’m worried about.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s you I’m worried about.” He leaned forward, his face turning stern. “You see, you step foot on his property, being the stranger you are, you’re liable to find yourself shot dead.”

Pastor Harkin laughed at first when I told him I wasn’t afraid of dying, but eventually he nodded in acceptance of that fact. Then he said he hoped I was a man of faith. I didn’t respond to that, but I asked if he thought it would help for him to give Bob Hunter a warning call. He didn’t think it would help at all. If anything, it would probably just ensure Bob would be waiting for me with his rifle aimed from a perch.

I saw the logic in what he was saying, and thanked him for his time. Despite my prodding, the good pastor wouldn’t volunteer the address. “I’m pretty sure it’s unpublished,” he said.