Scrapped (26 page)
Chapter 66
Annie left the crop a little early. She was still feeling a lack of energy and needed to chill on her couch and sort through some of her bizarre memories of the shooting and her hospital stay. As the blue lights of the TV screen flickered in the otherwise dark room, she sank into the couch cushions and noticed the stack of cards brought over from the hospital. She reached for them, thinking she really had not gotten a chance to look over them.
She heard the toilet flush and wondered which of her boys was roaming through the house. Soon Mike padded into the room.
“Hey, you’re home early,” he said and sat down next to her. “Something wrong?”
“Just tired,” she said. “Not myself.”
She opened one of the cards and laughed. That DeeAnn always made her smile. The next card was from her editor—very conservative blue. The card after that was thicker than the others.
“Give yourself some time, Annie. You’ve been through hell,” he said and placed his arm around her as she was opening the next card. A note fell out. It was from Hannah Bowman.
Please help me. I am afraid for my life.
Annie gasped. Tears stung her eyes. “Hannah,” she could barely say.
“What?” Mike said and reached for the note. “Good God. We need to call Bryant.”
“Wait,” Annie said. “She didn’t ask the police for help. She asked me.”
“Annie, I love you, but there is no way I am allowing you to go traipsing off to a godforsaken place to help a young woman who may be in danger. Besides, they’ve caught the murderer. He confessed.”
“Did you just say ‘allow’ me, Michael Jonathon?”
“Annie!”
“For God’s sake, Mike, do you think I’m a different person because I’m a mother now? Do you think that gives you the right to be in charge of me? Since when do you
allow
me to do anything?”
allow
me to do anything?”
“Are we going to discuss semantics now? Because you damn well know what I mean. I mean I don’t want you putting yourself in danger. We moved here for you to be safer, for us to be here for our boys, remember?”
“I know, Mike,” she said and sighed. “But it looks like I’m still a reporter. And more than that, I am a person. This young woman has reached out to me, and it might already be too late.”
“The police have—”
“I don’t believe that young man killed those young women,” she said for the first time, even though she’d felt it for some time.
“I’m confused. Luther confessed, right?”
“People confess for all sorts of reasons. Not always because they are guilty.”
“What makes you think Luther didn’t kill those women?”
“It’s just a feeling I have, Mike. And this whole case doesn’t make sense to me.”
“So you’re going to risk your life because of a feeling you have? Okay,” he said, running his fingers through his dark hair. “So, what if your feeling is right? What if you go up to the mountain to rescue this girl and get hurt again, or worse . . . ? Annie, what would I and the boys do without you?”
His brown eyes were filling with tears. This wasn’t just a power play. He wasn’t simply trying to tell her what to do. He was genuinely concerned. Every once in a while, Annie was struck by the feeling that she didn’t deserve this man. He loved her and wanted to protect her. Why was her first inclination to be angry with him?
“I mean, you were just shot. If that didn’t scare some sense into you, I just don’t know what the problem is,” he went on.
She took a deep breath.
“Okay, Mike. I am scared. I don’t want to go back to Jenkins Mountain. But Hannah is in danger. And maybe there’s a reason she asked me and not the police.”
“Yes, but you can’t risk going up there. Let’s call Bryant.”
“Bryant!” If steam could come out of her ears, it would have been filling up the room.
“What’s your problem with him?”
“Where do I start? He’s sexist, for one thing, a smart-ass, for another. Not helpful. A liar. Shall I go on?”
Mike grinned at Annie. “So he just sounds like most of the cops you’ve known. C’mon. He’s a cop. He’s got to be a good guy, basically. Right?”
“Okay,” she said, hesitating. “I’ll call, but you have to promise you will let me handle it.”
“Pinkie swear,” he said and kissed her.
Chapter 67
By the time Bryant came to the door, it was close to midnight. Annie had not calmed down, even though Mike had made her some chamomile tea, which usually helped soothe her.
“Can I get you some tea or something?” Mike said to him.
The detective looked at Annie. “I’ll have what she’s having. Thank you.” He sat across from Annie at the kitchen table. “What’s going on?”
“I went to the crop tonight, came home a bit early, started going through cards, and this slipped out of the one that Hannah Bowman gave me.”
“Whoa,” he said, reading it over.
Mike sat a cup of steaming tea in front of him.
“But we have the killer now,” Bryant said.
“She gave this to me after Luther confessed.”
“Are you sure?” His eyebrows knit. “I mean, she may not have known about the confession at that point.”
“No, I can’t be sure,” she said. “Everything was foggy for me. I was on all this medication.”
He sipped from his cup. “Interesting,” he said.
Annie wasn’t sure if he was talking about the tea or what she’d just said to him.
“I was shot,” she told him. “It’s taken a while for me to sort through this. But nothing has made sense from the beginning. It’s one of the strangest cases I’ve ever covered.”
“What do you mean?”
“The rune symbols are one thing, but the other things go in this order. The CDC showing up quickly during the second murder sighting, the FBI sending undercover agents here, and the way Cookie was held so long without being charged.”
The detective nearly choked on his tea. His eyes met hers as her husband sat next to her.
“Flight risk, my ass,” she finally said, glaring at him.
“What do you want from me?”
“I want answers, and I want you to help me rescue Hannah.”
“First, Hannah is in no danger. We have the killer. And second, why would I tell you anything? This is police business.”
Mike’s arm went around her in a protective stance.
“I’m a crime reporter, Bryant. I’ve worked on a lot of cases, but nothing like this. At some point everything comes together and makes sense. The more I think about it, I think we’re missing a huge part of the puzzle. But you know what? I can live with that. I don’t need to do your job for you. If you feel like Luther is your man, then fine. But how difficult would it be for us to go and check on Hannah?”
“Us?” Mike said. “I don’t think so.”
“I agree with your husband, Annie. Let’s not rush into anything. You’re barely healed from your wound. But here’s what I’ll do. I’ll give the bakery a call in the morning to check on her, okay?”
“Let’s call now,” Annie said.
“It’s almost one a.m.”
“The first shift is probably getting in now,” Annie said, handing him the telephone.
“Nah, that’s okay. I got it,” he said and pulled out his cell phone.
Annie’s heart was racing. Was Hannah in trouble? Were they too late? Why hadn’t she looked at her cards earlier?
Within moments Bryant ascertained that Hannah hadn’t been to work in two days. Her parents didn’t have a telephone, so nobody from the bakery was able to call to see where she was. If her parents knew she was missing, they would deal with it in their own community.
Bryant clicked his cell phone off. “Son of a bitch. She’s missing.” His face was an angry red.
Annie’s stomach clenched, and her head dropped to Mike’s shoulder. “I didn’t want to be right about this,” she said.
Chapter 68
After making a deal with Bryant about getting an exclusive, Annie caved in and stayed at home, next to the computer and phone. She slept off and on while lying on the couch, until Sam and Ben got up and her day began with fixing breakfast for her boys. She made pancakes, feeling the need to start the day with a sturdy meal.
When the phone rang, she jumped, but it was Beatrice. When Beatrice heard the news, she called the others. By noon, Annie’s house was filled with food and people. She still had no word from Bryant.
“It seems like there’s something we could be doing,” Sheila said, waving her arms around.
“That’s foolish. You need to leave these matters to the police,” Beatrice said.
“Humph,” Vera said, shoving a spoon of sweet potato baby food into Elizabeth’s mouth. “I don’t know about these Cumberland Creek Police.”
When the phone rang at 2:30, the boys were playing outside. It was unusually warm for November.
“We found her,” Bryant said. “She’s not right, but she’s alive.”
“What do you mean, she’s not right?” Annie asked.
A hush came over Annie’s kitchen. All the women were looking at her, as if they could hear the entire conversation if they stared hard enough.
“She’s either on drugs or has had some kind of mental collapse. Maybe both.” His voice was strained.
“Who did this to her?”
“Zeb McClain.”
“Jesus,” Annie said.
“Look, I promised you an exclusive. I should be back at the station in about twenty minutes. Can you be there? This is going to be one hell of a story.”
“Yes, I’ll be there,” she said.
“They found her. She’s still alive,” Annie announced after hanging up the phone.
“Thank God,” someone said among the sighs of relief.
Annie’s husband wrapped his arms around her. “Oh, Annie,” he said. “My Annie.”
She wanted to stay there in his arms forever at that moment.
Beatrice came up behind them and circled her arms around them. Soon Vera, Sheila, DeeAnn, and Paige were surrounding them.
G
URU
OF
J
ENKINS
M
OUNTAIN
URU
OF
J
ENKINS
M
OUNTAIN
By Annie Chamovitz
Zeb McClain had a vision. In his vision, a ghostly specter came to him and told him he had been “chosen” to lead his people. He could rebuild the economy of his mountains with the money he’d earn by selling methamphetamines. Only the weak took drugs, and for the “race” to strengthen, drugs were necessary to help “weed” them out.
“The voices came to him only during certain times. Other times he received messages in runic patterns,” said Detective Bryant of the Cumberland Creek police force.
“We often see delusions of grandeur, hear about voices in these cases where a person sets him or herself up as a spiritual leader,” said Dr. Jane Ivan, consulting psychiatrist. “This man also suffers from a kind of post-traumatic stress syndrome. He still relives his parents’ brutal murder.”
Whether as a victim, a misguided spiritual teacher, or simply a drug trafficker, McClain was not stupid. He set up a complicated system of trafficking drugs in and out of Jenkins Mountain and Jenkins Hollow, using cutting-edge technology, such as calcite. Only a few people are actually skilled enough to configure calcite in such a way that it would render their stash and lab invisible. Because of his money, he was able to attract and pay brilliant young scientists—like Luther Vandergrift—to experiment with the calcite, which Jenkins Mountain is filled with.
Invisibility? Isn’t that the stuff of fairy tales and Harry Potter?
Not according to researchers at the University of Birmingham, England. Using a paperweight-size lump of calcite, researchers were able to hide a paper clip or pin from view. The lead researcher, Shuang Zhang, noted that hiding a large dog would be possible with a crystal twenty feet long and around six feet thick.
The basic premise is that calcite is naturally birefringent, which means it sends light waves along different paths depending on their polarizations. Once polarized light is shone on the prism of calcite, the object within becomes invisible to those looking at it from outside.
Take a brilliant but misguided young scientist, like Luther Vandergrift, and now Jenkins Mountain has the largest “invisible” calcite compound in the world.
“Vandergrift’s DNA was all over the crime scenes,” Bryant confirmed. “But so was McClain’s. Vandergrift, of course, confessed to save McClain because he thought he was doing important work as a messenger of God. This is also why he carved messages into the body parts of the women who were killed, and tried to kill a baby, who was a product of one of these women and therefore could not be allowed to live.”
But the child, left to die of exposure, did survive and is now happily with its mother’s parents. Despite the shunning of their daughter, they accepted her baby into their home.
The New Mountain Order (NMO) group had 113 members living in an area just outside what is known as the “Nest” in Jenkins Hollow. They live in a dorm near the compound that housed the calcite and the drug lab. Many of its members claim no knowledge of the methamphetamine lab, the trafficking, or the murders. They claim they have come from far and wide just to learn the spiritual secrets Zeb McClain offered. Of course, the “secrets” McClain offered were in actuality old concepts, dusted off and placed in his own book—a mishmash of Eastern philosophy, Norse paganism, and Mennonite beliefs.
A search on the background of his followers reveals a group of drifters and outcasts. Whether they call themselves artists, healers, or scientists, they believed they found a home on Jenkins Mountain and a leader in Zeb McClain.
Hannah Bowman was a good friend of both of McClain’s earlier victims. Sarah, the mother of his child, had been shunned by her own community because of her association with him. She was adrift, staying with him for a while, then staying at Rebecca’s home. The two of them sometimes chatted with Hannah about NMO and Zeb’s visions and, chillingly enough, about the need for sacrifices.
“The term
sacrifice
was used like a metaphor—or so I thought. People gave their money to the organization. Women gave themselves to Zeb. All of this was done in the name of sacrifice. His spirit needed to be fed in order to maintain clear contact with God,” Hannah said.
sacrifice
was used like a metaphor—or so I thought. People gave their money to the organization. Women gave themselves to Zeb. All of this was done in the name of sacrifice. His spirit needed to be fed in order to maintain clear contact with God,” Hannah said.
But soon, she explained, the terminology became violent, and the next thing she knew, they were sacrificing animals.
The last time Hannah saw Sarah alive, Sarah was so frightened that she could barely speak. Though Hannah was able to calm her down, she still made no sense, muttering words about seeing Zeb with another woman and something about meth.
“I’m finished,” Sarah said to her. “I’m taking the baby and going to Pennsylvania to stay with my cousin. I want nothing to do with drugs.”
When Hannah read about the body of a red-haired young woman washing ashore in Cumberland Creek, she knew it was Sarah. When Rebecca’s body was found, Hannah grew even more frightened. Who to turn to? Who would believe her?
She knew she was in trouble the day Zeb McClain walked into the bakery with Luther Vandergrift.
“It was just the way they looked at me. I can’t explain it.”
Little did they know, she was expecting them and had already left a note asking for help.
Annie’s editor was pleased with the first article. Their paper was the first to break this story—of national significance because of the cult slant and the millions of dollars in illegal drugs that were found, in a cave in Jenkins Mountain, in a huge crevice that was covered with the “invisible” calcite crystal, which was discovered by complete accident. An officer tripped over it. She promised her editor more interviews and write-ups on this case. But after she was finished, she told him, she wanted to take an extended vacation. What she didn’t tell him was the rest of the story.
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