The Prophet Motive (15 page)

“Amazing.” John shook his head.

Marilyn stepped in front of Fry, going nose-to-nose with him. “In the morning, Deputy, please telephone John’s homicide chief in San Francisco, Captain Switzer, and relay to him that it is my professional opinion as a police psychologist that Inspector Richetti is no longer competent to continue with this investigation and—”

“What the—” John said.

“And that he should be directed to remove himself from the investigation post haste, to be placed in a psychiatric unit for a period of observation and counseling.”

“Um . . .” Fry looked to John.

John gripped Marilyn by the upper arm and whirled her around to face him. “I thought we were partners now.”

“We are,” she said, “and I’m looking out for my partner. You need to go, John. Now. Leave tonight with Deputy Fry, if you know what’s good for you. You’re starting to believe in The Wizard. You told me so yourself.”

“I . . . I was just doing what good cops do. Throwing out a possible scenario.”

“What? That The Wizard really has magic powers?”

Fry chuckled. John whirled on him, grateful the color of his face couldn’t be seen in the darkness. “Go ahead and do what she asks. My chief knows me. He won’t listen to her.”

“Okay,” Fry said.

“In the meantime, we’ve got a B and E to do tonight, so let’s get going.” John stalked off towards Fry’s vehicle, but after only a few steps, reversed course. “I smell fried chicken!” He took Fry’s head in his hands and kissed him on the forehead, making an exaggerated smacking sound. “Make it a steak dinner next time, deputy, and you could get lucky!”

They ate inside the vehicle, an unmarked four-door sedan, mid-sized. John commandeered the passenger seat and the cardboard bucket of chicken. Fry sat behind the wheel. Marilyn sat alone in the rear.

“What else did The Wizard say on TV?” she said between bites.

“What else?” Fry said. “Let’s see . . . This is kind of interesting. He said he admired the Mexican people and their culture very much, and that he planned to live in Mexico part of the year. He’s bought a farm down in Sonora, Mexico. Hopes to start a spiritual retreat there. Gave out his Web page address for anyone who’s interested in helping him get started.”

“Christ!” she said. “He’s franchising!”

Fry glanced at her over his drumstick. “Yeah?”

“It’s not that unusual actually. Some cult leaders develop pockets of followers in different countries. John, do you remember, during your training session, when I discussed a cult called the Aum Supreme Truth?”

“Yep. Blind cult leader in Japan. Ordered the Tokyo poison gas attacks. Turned some of his own followers into ashes using industrial size microwave ovens.”

“Right,” she said. “Shoko Asahara once had ten thousand followers spread throughout Japan and Russia.”

“So the bullfight was some kind of weird publicity stunt?” Fry said.

“It could well be,” she said.

“But how the hell did The Wizard pull it off?”

Both men turned to Marilyn. “My best guess is this. That bull secretly belonged to The Wizard all along. He paid off some official at the bullfight to use his bull. He trained his bull to stop at his command right in front of him and . . .” The men were shaking their heads.

“Cattle are dumber than a box of rocks,” Fry said. “You can’t train them to do anything.”

“And how do you explain,” John said to her, “the incredible energy the bull had at the end? It was wounded, exhausted, on its last legs. Then all of a sudden it was acting like a massive dose of PCP had kicked in.”

“Maybe it had,” she said.

“Marilyn,” John said, “if a very dumb thousand pound animal jacked up on PCP was running toward you like a freight train, would you just stand there?”

She sighed. “I suppose not.”

“Let’s get down to business,” John said, licking the grease off his fingers.

Fry started the engine, hit the headlights, and wheeled the car out of the ditch and onto the road. As he drove, they went over their plan for the night.

Fry turned left onto the paved road running in front of the farm. No vehicle lights shone in either direction. Five minutes later, the deputy switched off his headlights and coasted the car to a stop outside the farmhouse containing the administrative offices. He left the engine idling.

John checked his watch. It was 1:40 a.m. He scanned the area surrounding the farmhouse with night-vision binoculars. No sentries stationed, no guards patrolling.

Fry popped the trunk release. “You sure there aren’t any motion detectors outside somewhere?” On reconnaissance the night before, they hadn’t located any.

“Too close to the road,” Marilyn said, opening her door. “I’m sure they don’t want the neighbors or the local constabulary snooping around, wondering what they’ve got to hide, or protect.”

John hopped out of the vehicle, along with Marilyn. He opened the trunk so they could grab the items they would need. But first he shoved the night-vision binoculars into her chest.

“Here you go.
Partner
.”

She ignored the sarcasm, simply hung the binoculars around her neck. John grabbed a small backpack and a cellphone he set on vibrate. Marilyn clipped a cell phone inside the breast pocket of her shirt. Fry busied himself unstrapping an orchard ladder from the roof of the car, the one he’d swiped from a peach tree on the farm.

Marilyn said to John: “Maybe you should let Fry do the breakin. He’s younger, and surely more agile.”

“This is a job for Batman,” he said, “not Boy Wonder.”

John and the deputy carried the ladder to the split-rail fence. John scrambled over it alone and Fry passed the ladder off to him. He carried it to the front of the farmhouse, which was lit by floodlights at the corners, and stood it up so that it leaned against the edge of the pitched roof.

Marilyn scaled the oak tree that towered beside the farmhouse and leant shade to a corner of the building during daylight. Fry returned to the car and quietly inched the vehicle away until it disappeared in the darkness.

John slipped into work gloves before climbing his way up the ladder and to the peak of the roof. Just below the peak, on the side of the house facing Marilyn’s tree, a wooden vent allowed air to circulate inside the attic. The vent was the quickest entry point into the building, given that the doors and windows were wired to an alarm system.

John removed a crowbar from the backpack and pried the vent loose. He hoisted it up onto the roof and placed it down on the asphalt tiles. He tossed his backpack inside the attic before attempting his own entry, feet-first. His body struggled to fit through the rectangular opening. His shoulders found the toughest passage, but he squeezed through by folding them inwards, toward his chest cavity. Inside, he strapped on his backpack.

The attic space was cramped. He had to walk hunchbacked across the plywood floorboards, which creaked with every step. The beam of his flashlight found a row of dusty cardboard boxes, several small file cabinets, a few coils of electrical wire, an old Hewlett-Packard computer monitor, without a keyboard, and an empty picture frame, but no stairs.

The exit in the floor was covered with a square piece of painted wood with two-foot sides. He lifted it up and set it aside before aiming his flashlight through the opening. Below he glimpsed a second floor hallway.

He dropped through, landing on a hardwood floor, falling to his hands and knees. When he stood, he realized that the ceiling overhead was seven feet high. Climbing back inside the attic without a stepladder would be challenging. But there was no sense in worrying about that right now.

He shot his flashlight beam down the dark, empty hallway and felt the unnerving sensation of being watched again. He wondered what the limits were to The Wizard’s mysterious powers.

Oh, what a feeling when that bull had pulled up short!

Yes, he wanted to believe in the man, and to blame the deaths in San Francisco on Tom Mahorn and Daryl Finck entirely. The alternative, it seemed, was to acknowledge a kind of satanic supernatural force at play in the world.

He found the door below the entrance to the attic locked by a deadbolt. The adjacent door was open. It led into an office.

With his flashlight, John discovered a law degree from the University of Southern California hanging on the wall. It belonged to the cult’s legal counsel, Michael Brimley. Quickly, he glued an electronic listening bug beneath the center of the desktop, then did the same in two other open rooms, also offices.

On the first floor, John gave just a glance to the small waiting area near the front door, which he suspected was for the salesmen and produce haulers who came to call.

In the main office in the rear of the building the overhead lights were on. He approached with slow, silent steps. A few feet from the entryway, he heard a computer humming. He crept close enough to take in the entire room, finding no one inside, but he spotted motion activated surveillance cameras mounted high on the walls, and he turned back.

He searched for, then found, the door leading into the cellar. The cellar’s ceiling was low, its stone walls cracked and crumbling and bulging inwards in places. John had to bend down to avoid the ceiling beams.

Circling the furnace, he spotted the fuse box. With his flashlight, he scanned for fuse labels, but found none. So with the big blade of his Swiss army knife, he pried one fuse out, then leapt up the short flight of stairs to see if he’d turned off the electricity in the main office.

He hadn’t. He’d turned off some of the outside floodlights instead. He rushed back to the fuse box, replaced the fuse, pried another, and leapt up the stairs again. He moved as fast as he could, knowing that, outside, anyone watching the farmhouse from the rear would see lights flickering on and off.

On his fifth attempt, he got it right. He caught his breath and wiped the sweat from his brow.

Inside the main office, he burned ten minutes disassembling the most powerful computer in the room, the one that had been running through the night. He burned five minutes installing a small, electronic device in the logic board that would allow Fry, who would later be hiding nearby in his car, to view the computer screen exactly as it appeared to the user inside the office.

After putting the machine back together, John disconnected the wires connecting it to a DSL line and a printer so that he could briefly move the computer into the adjacent room, where there was electricity, and copy the contents of the hard drive onto a zip drive he carried.

He lifted the computer off the desktop. Then froze. The back door, three feet away, had glass panes, and through them he could see the shadowy figure of a man approaching from across the lawn. The man carried a rifle.

John dropped the computer back in its place and ducked behind the desk. Shortly, he heard what he feared to be the rattling of keys and peered over the desktop. The man’s silhouette hovered just beyond the door.

L. Rob Piper lay in bed, unable to fall asleep. Who could blame him? Today had been a delirious joy, and the result—beyond successful. His exploit down in Tijuana had made news all over the planet. Such a triumph!

In the piddling few hours since the big event, his Internet web page had taken more than sixty-five thousand hits. He would fill his new, Mexican farm with bodies in no time flat. Soon, his riches would be growing at three times their current rate—a rate already phenomenal.

He flicked on his nightstand light. Until weariness set in, he would reward himself with a special treat.

Using the phone on his bed stand, he made a quick call. Afterwards, he threw on his black silk bathrobe and sat down in front of his computer to check the web site counter again.

The number of hits had now climbed to eighty-four thousand seven hundred and fifty-nine. Terrific!

He began reading news accounts of the bullfight posted on the Internet. A short time later, he heard a knock at the front door. He knew it would be Amanda Simmons. Day or night, any follower he wanted would arrive at his doorstep as quickly and easily as if he’d ordered a pizza. He got up to greet her.

“Please do come in,” he said.

“Thank you.” Amanda stepped inside, her eyes downcast, shoulders hunched. This was the first time she’d ever been alone with him.

He led her into his living room. She stood in front of the Monet replica on the wall, admiring it. He admired her.

She was five foot six inches tall. Her long brown hair reached to the middle of her back. She crossed her arms over the pendulous breasts that had first grabbed his attention.

“How old are you, my dear?” he asked.

“Twenty.” She turned from the Monet, uncrossing her arms. His eyes lingered on the nipples peeping through her beige tank top, still perky from the night air.

“Twenty. A delicious age.” The same age as Esperanza Chavez would’ve been. He still missed that hot little Hispanic number, that tight, little brown body, the way it sounded when he slapped it, the way it trembled and shivered and cried. “Sister Amanda, I’ll get right to the point. I want your body.”