The Prophet (34 page)

Eleanor Adare Schofield stared out the window of the Belmont Motel and thought about the perfect life that she had left behind. The motel was small with an orange and white faux-brick ex-terior. The big white and blue neon sign out front advertised telephones, air conditioning, and TV as though they were luxury items, but she supposed that just by looking at the place one would wonder about such things. The interior walls were bright yellow. The bedspread had a quilted white and yellow sunflower print that looked like something her grandmother had had on her bed when Eleanor was a child. The room had a faint musty smell like someone’s basement that had been sprayed with disinfectant, but at least it was relatively clean.

The thought made her sick. Had she fallen so far that providing a place for her children to sleep that wasn’t infested with cockroaches seemed like a victory?

Harrison had told her to go to the Belmont as if he had planned for it, as if he had considered such a thing before. He had told her to pay in cash, but she had been shocked to learn that a room in a dump like this was sixty dollars a night. She never kept much cash on hand—they always used their credit cards and paid them off at the end of the month—and so she had been forced to go across the street and withdraw the money from an ATM.

Eleanor had told the kids that they were going away on a surprise vacation. The younger two had accepted this with few questions, but she knew that Alison suspected something. She probably thought they were getting a divorce, and maybe they were. Alison had her earbuds in now. Benjamin played his little game system while Melanie watched
Dora the Explorer
on a small tube television with a washed-out picture. The little Pomeranian dog that Harrison had brought home rested on Melanie’s lap.

When the phone on the nightstand rang, Eleanor jumped away from the window and cried out so loud in surprise that Alison pulled out her earbuds and looked at her mother with wide, startled eyes. Eleanor fumbled with the receiver and said, “Hello?”

“It’s me. Are you okay? Have you had any problems?”

At first she felt relieved to hear Harrison’s voice, but once the initial spark of warmth and safety faded, she wasn’t sure what to feel. She fought back tears. While she’d been in the motel office paying for the room, she had seen the news about a hostage situation at SSA. She had heard the horrible things that her husband was accused of, and she knew that it was all true. A part of her had always known, and she blamed herself for not doing something about it sooner. But another part of her refused to believe that their entire life together had been a lie.

“Eleanor, are you there?”

She started to speak but her throat felt dry and she had no idea where to begin. She pulled the phone from the nightstand, moved into the bathroom, and closed the door behind her. The room was mint green and smelled like bleach.

The other end of the line was silent for a moment, but then he said, “You saw the news, didn’t you?”

“Yes—they say that you’re the Anarchist. That you’re wanted in connection with over ten murders.”

“I’m sorry, Eleanor. I wish you hadn’t seen that.”

“That way you could lie to me some more?”

“No, so you could hear it from me. So you could understand.”

“There’s nothing to understand, Harrison. You’re a murderer. How could you?”

When he spoke, she could hear the pain in his voice. “Because I was born without a soul.”

The statement shocked her. He had told her of the abuse he had endured as a child, but she never thought that he actually believed the things he had been told by his mother and the other members of that cult. Maybe she should have known? A sense of her own failure as a wife gnawed at her.

“That’s ridiculous. Your mother and those people were insane. You know that.”

“I don’t know what to believe. All I wanted was to be whole for you. To be the husband and father that you and the children deserved. I’m so sorry that I’ve failed you.” His voice cracked, and she could hear his tears.

She wanted to hate him, but yet a part of her pitied him. She had always known that his perception of the world had been scarred as a result of his childhood, but she had never realized how deep those wounds went.

“Harrison, we love you. We always have, and we always will. But you need to turn yourself in. We’ll get through this together.”

“I can’t.”

“Yes, you can. You need help. We can’t get through this alone.”

“You don’t understand. The reason that I told you to run wasn’t for my own good. It was because you’re in danger.”

“Danger from who?”

“The Prophet.”

“The leader of that cult? I thought you said he was dead.”

“No, he never let me go. He’s always been there. He’s been the devil on my shoulder since the day I was born. And now he wants you. He wants to sacrifice you and the kids.”

She stifled a sharp cry, and her knees felt weak. “Damn you, Harrison. How could you put our children in danger?”

“I never meant for any of this to happen. You have to believe me.”

“That’s all the more reason for you to turn yourself in. The police can help us. Maybe they’ll give you some kind of a deal if you testify against him.”

“The most I could hope for would be a mental institution instead of a prison. I won’t subject you and the kids to that kind of humiliation. I know what that feels like, and I would never do that to you. I have money. We can leave this all—”

Eleanor jumped and dropped the phone as the sound of someone banging on the door echoed off the mint-green tile of the bathroom. She immediately opened the door, expecting to see one of the kids, but instead she found a strange man standing on the other side.

Sitting in his own seedy motel room, Harrison Schofield gripped the receiver of the old rotary phone sitting on the nightstand and screamed his wife’s name. He heard a banging noise followed by a clattering as though she had dropped the phone and then a stifled scream.

As he yelled for her, he felt his whole world fall down around him. He knew that the Prophet had found them. A vision of his children burning alive flooded his mind as he sank to his knees.

But then a man’s voice came over from the other end of the line. The voice was deep and full of menace, and Schofield didn’t recognize it.

The words were simple and straight to the point. “I have your family, and I’m going to kill them unless you do exactly as you’re told.”

The blizzard had come in the night. It swept over Chicagoland like a tsunami, and the flakes seemed to be flying in every direction. As Marcus walked up to the rented house, the snow stung his cheeks and eyes and made it so that he could barely see his surroundings. They had found a place on Artesian Avenue in Brighton Park ten minutes from downtown Chicago. The house was technically for sale, but some cold hard cash for a week’s rental of an empty house was an easy choice for the owner. The man had described the place as a bungalow, but to Marcus it looked more like a small barn with bluish shingle siding and a bright red porch. It didn’t surprise him that the house had been sitting empty for so long.

He knocked, and Andrew opened the door. Once inside, Marcus stamped his feet on the welcome mat to clear the snow and shook the cold from his shoulders. The interior wasn’t much better. There was no carpet, just pale yellow linoleum and rust-colored wallpaper. Several of the interior doors had been inexplicably torn from their casings, and the whole house reeked of urine. He guessed that was the reason there were no carpets. Maybe some lady with a thousand cats had lived here before and just let her darlings defecate where they wished.

The look on Andrew’s face illustrated his feelings about the place. “It’s only temporary,” Marcus said.

“It had better be.”

“How’s the family holding up?”

“About as you’d expect,” Andrew said. “But I don’t get it. Why didn’t we just let Schofield come to his family and grab him then? Why the ruse of a kidnapping?”

“Because if Conlan has those women, they’ll be dead by tonight. We don’t have time for an interrogation. Conlan is extremely unstable and delusional. There’s no way to predict what he’ll do. We need Schofield to believe that his family’s lives are on the line. If we threaten to take away what he loves, he’ll give us Conlan.”

“I hope you’re right, but I still don’t like it. Maggie or I should be going with you.”

“We don’t have enough manpower. I’ll have Stupak with me, and we’ll need his help once we have a location on the women. Besides, I can handle Schofield.”

Andrew’s phone dinged, and he glanced at the screen and shook his head.

“What was that?” Marcus said.

Andrew laughed. “Nothing. I’m just playing Scrabble online with Allen. He’s getting stir crazy in that bed. He’s not used to lying around.”

“How’s the game going?”

“Allen’s killing me. The Professor has a pretty impressive vocabulary. Maggie’s on her way to visit him now, and she wanted to stop in and check on that old man who she saved. You should go see Allen, too. You’ve got some time before the meeting with Schofield. The hospital is on the way.”

“I don’t know. We’ll see.”

“What happened to him wasn’t your fault. You know that, right? Nobody blames you. Least of all Allen.”

Marcus said nothing. He just nodded and headed for the only closed door in the house. He knocked, and a voice on the other side told him to come in. When he opened the door, a little orange dog yapped at him. Eleanor Schofield sat on the yellow linoleum floor, playing Candyland with her son and youngest daughter. She was trying to smile and put on a good face for the kids, but he could see the sadness and pain behind her eyes.

“Can I have a word?” Marcus said.

She nodded and followed him into the living room where Andrew sat on the couch fiddling with his phone.

He closed the door behind her and said, “I just wanted to thank you for your cooperation on this.”

“I’m doing it for those missing women, not for you.” She gestured toward a lock that Andrew had installed on the outside of the door and said, “Are we prisoners here? You stuck us in a room with a lock and no windows.”

“It’s for your own protection. Hopefully, this will all be over very soon.”

“My husband’s not a monster.”

“I never said that he was.”

Marcus could see her eyes taking on a watery sheen. Her voice was hoarse and trembling. “I just can’t accept that it was all a lie. He’s a good man. I know he is. He’s sick, and he needs help.”

“I don’t think your husband is a monster or evil. I used to think of men like him in those terms because it was easier to wrap my mind around. It’s difficult to accept that we all have darkness in our hearts. We’re all sinners and saints. Just to varying degrees. We’re all capable of inflicting pain and hatred on this world, and we’re all capable of showing compassion and love. I believe in evil, but I don’t think that it lives in your husband. He is sick, but I also can’t let him go on hurting people because of it.”

Eleanor looked away and whispered, “I know.”

“There’s something else that you should keep in mind. I believe that this plan is going to work only because of how strongly your husband loves you and your children. And no matter what happens, you should hang on to that.”

Vasques looked pale. All manner of tubes and bandages coiled around her sleeping form, and her eyes fluttered behind closed lids. Marcus had grown accustomed to her sweet floral scent, but rubbing alcohol and cleaning fluids had bleached that away. Its absence made her seem like less of the person he had known, as though a part of her had already died.

A blond-haired man with pasty white features sat next to her bed, his hand folded around hers. The man wore a white button-down shirt. It was untucked and a black tie hung loosely around his neck. His eyes were bloodshot.

The blond man glanced in Marcus’s direction but didn’t say a word. Still, Marcus noticed his breathing change as if he were angry at being disturbed. “Are you Vasques’s brother?” Marcus said.

“No, I’m her partner. Special Agent LaPaglia.”

“It’s good to meet you. I’m Special Agent Marcus Williams from the DOJ. Vasques and I were working this case together.” He stuck out his hand, but LaPaglia didn’t return the gesture. After a moment, Marcus’s hand fell back to his side. He asked, “How’s she doing?”

“She’s stable. They think she’s out of the woods.” LaPaglia shook his head. “It’s your fault that this happened.”

“How do you figure?”

“It was your idea to use Belacourt to draw the others in. You should have taken him into custody like any other suspect and interrogated him. It’s your little game that caused this.”

“Vasques isn’t the kind of woman that needs to be told what to do. It was her call on how to handle Belacourt. But if I’d have been there at the scene, maybe this wouldn’t have happened.”

LaPaglia sprang from the hospital chair and shoved his hands against Marcus’s chest, pushing him back. “You saying that I didn’t have her back? Get out! You’re not welcome here.”

Marcus raised his hands in surrender and backed toward the door. He knew better than to argue with someone whose vision had been clouded by grief and doubt and a lack of sleep. He turned to leave but then stopped himself. “LaPaglia, someone recently gave me some good advice that I’ll pass on to you. When she wakes up, tell her how you really feel.”

Allen’s hospital room was the same as Marcus remembered. The same antiseptic smell filled the air. Same shades of blue, same furniture, same machines beeping and whirring. But the mood was different. When he had been here before, there’d been a somber aura smothering everything and that had colored his memories of the place. But now Allen was sitting up and laughing along with his wife and Maggie. He still had the tubes connected to his arms and running into his nose and the doctors still weren’t sure if he would walk again, but at least he was smiling and the color had returned to his cheeks.

Allen leaned over a rolling tray full of food that he was shoveling into his mouth as though he hadn’t eaten in a week. “This food tastes like you cooked it, Loren,” Allen said to his wife. “The meat has the tenderness of shoe leather, and I think someone spat in my mashed potatoes.”

“If you know what’s good for you, old man, you’ll shut your mouth,” Loren replied. “I have power of attorney. I can tell the docs to turn these machines off and let you wither.”

“Teach not thy lip such scorn, for it was made for kissing, lady, not for such contempt,” Allen said, quoting Shakespeare.

Marcus stepped into the room and joined the conversation. “In general, those who have nothing to say contrive to spend the longest time in doing it.”

Loren laughed and gave Marcus a big hug. “Sounds like that guy knew you, Allen.”

Allen gave a dirty look to both of them. “That was James Russell Lowell, an American poet. And I believe he died in the 1890s, so I never had the pleasure. You’ve been saving that one up for just such a moment. Haven’t you, kid?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Marcus replied with a grin. “Where are the kids?”

“Down in the cafeteria. And if you wouldn’t mind, ladies, I have something that I need to discuss with Marcus in private.”

Maggie stood up from a recliner beside Allen’s bed, and Loren grabbed her purse. On the way out, Loren patted Marcus on the shoulder and said, “Just smile and nod. That’s what I do.” Then she stuck her tongue out at Allen. Marcus could see the older man suppressing a grin.

Once they were gone, Marcus said, “So what’s up?”

“I need to talk to you about Ackerman for a moment.”

“We’ll get him, Allen. He’s getting bolder. He’ll make a mistake, and I’ll be there when he does.”

“That’s not what I meant. I just wanted to . . .” Allen sighed. “There’s something that I should have told you a long time ago. And I’m sorry.”

Marcus squeezed his hand. “Thank you, but it’s okay. I know the connection between the two of us.”

“You do?”

“Yeah, Ackerman hinted at it, and I confronted the Director. He told me that Ackerman’s father killed my parents.”

Allen closed his eyes and shook his head. “Oh, my boy, I’m afraid that’s only scratching the surface.”