The Soul Catcher (44 page)

“But wait. There’s got to be something you can tell me that could help me bring down Everett.”

“Bring him down?”

“Yes. Exactly.”

“You’ll never get him. Most of what he does is legit, and what he does that isn’t…Well, you don’t see any of us lining up to press charges, do you?”

“Only because you’re still afraid of him. Why let him control your life? We can protect you.”

“We? You mean the government?” She laughed, a true, genuine laugh. Then she slung her backpack over her shoulder. “You can’t protect me until you get Everett. And you’ll never get him. Even if you try, he’ll know. He’ll have them all lined up for their cyanide capsules and dead before you step foot inside the compound.” She hesitated, glancing around the park as if making certain it was safe. As if she expected Everett to appear from behind a monument or a tree.

“What did you do?” Maggie asked.

“Excuse me?”

“What was it that you did to deserve the Well?”

“I wouldn’t stop trying to take care of my mom. She was the only reason I was there. And she was sick. I kept sneaking her my food. The breaking point was when I stole some of her heart medicine to give to her. It was her own medicine that had been confiscated from her, because, of course, Father’s love is the only medicine anyone needs.”

“Where is your mom now?”

Maggie watched Eve disconnect as she stared out over her head. It was like turning an on-off switch.

“She died the day after he put me in the Well. I think she felt so guilty, she had a heart attack. I’ll never know for sure.” She looked at Maggie through her dark glasses, reflecting back the Wall. “In the end, he always wins. Just be careful for yourself and especially for your mom.”

Then she turned and left.

West Potomac Park
Washington, D.C.

M
aggie stopped at the drinking fountain and took long, slow gulps. The afternoon had turned unseasonably warm for November. She hadn’t been far into her run when she peeled off her sweatshirt and knotted it around her waist.

Now she pulled the sweatshirt loose and wiped the dripping sweat from her forehead and the water from her chin as she scanned the surroundings. She looked up and down the Mall, watching for the woman she had talked to earlier, who had given her a long list of instructions but failed to include a single description of what she looked like.

Maggie found the wooden bench on the grassy knoll overlooking the Vietnam Wall, exactly where the woman told her it would be. Then she put a foot up on the bench’s back rail and began her leg stretches, something she seldom did after running, always feeling like she didn’t have time. But this, too, had been requested, as well as the strict instructions to wear nothing that would give her away as a law enforcement officer: no FBI T-shirts, no bulging holsters, guns or badges, no navy-blue. Not even a baseball cap or sunglasses.

Maggie wondered—and not for the first time—what good it would do to talk to someone so paranoid. Chances were, she’d get some delusional perspective, some skewed vision of reality. Yet she felt fortunate that Cunningham and Senator Brier had found someone willing to talk. An aid in Senator Brier’s office had tracked the woman down, and although she had agreed to meet Maggie, she had insisted on remaining anonymous. The cloak-and-dagger game didn’t bother Maggie. As long as this woman, an ex-member of Everett’s church, could provide a view of Everett that Maggie knew she’d never find in any FBI file. And certainly a view she’d never get from her mother.

High school kids outnumbered tourists, scattered all along the sidewalks, hiking up the Lincoln Memorial steps and winding around the bronze sculptures of the Korean Veterans and Vietnam Women’s Memorials. More field trips. Wasn’t that why Emma Tully had been at the monuments the other day? November must be prime time for school field trips, though the educational significance seemed to be lost on most of them. Yes, other than the students there were very few tourists.

Then Maggie saw her. The woman wore faded blue jeans, too loose for her tall, thin frame, a long-sleeved chambray shirt and dark aviator sunglasses. Her long brown hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and Maggie could see that she wore little, if any, makeup. A camera hung from her neck and a backpack from her shoulder while she stopped and reached with paper and pencil to do a rubbing against the Wall.

She looked like any other tourist, a family member completing her journey and paying homage to a loved one, a fallen soldier. The woman took three rubbings before she came over and sat on the bench next to Maggie. She started pulling out of her backpack a sandwich wrapped in wax paper, a bag of Doritos and a bottled water. Without a word, she began eating, looking out over the park and watching. For a minute, Maggie wondered if she had been wrong about this being her mysterious contact. She took another look at the tourists at the Wall. Was it possible the woman had changed her mind and not come?

“Do you know anyone on the wall?” the woman asked without looking at Maggie while she sipped her water.

“Yes,” Maggie answered, expecting the question. “My uncle, my father’s brother.”

“What was his name?”

The exchange was casual, an everyday occurrence between two complete strangers sitting on a park bench in front of the one monument that seemed to touch every American’s life somehow. An everyday exchange and yet so very clever. No way to mistake the details of this question.

“His name was Patrick O’Dell.”

The woman seemed neither pleased nor especially interested and picked up her sandwich again. “And so you are Maggie,” she said with a slight nod, taking a bite and keeping her eyes on a game of tag that had broken out between several of the teenagers up on the hill.

“What should I call you?” Maggie asked, since she’d been given only the woman’s initials.

“You can call me…” She hesitated, took another sip of water and glanced at the bottle. “Call me Eve,” she said.

Maggie caught a glimpse of the bottle’s label: Evian. This was ridiculous. But names didn’t matter as long as she answered her questions.

“Okay, Eve.” She waited. No one was within earshot, and the game of tag was drawing everyone’s attention. “What can you tell me about Everett and his so-called church?”

“Well.” She crunched several chips, offering the bag to Maggie. Maggie accepted. “The church is a ruse to get donations and stockpile money and arms. But he’s not interested in taking over the world or the government. He preaches the word of the Lord only to get what he wants.”

“So if it’s not to overtake the government or even terrorize the government, what is it he wants?”

“Power, of course. Power over his own little world.”

“So he doesn’t even believe?”

“Oh, he believes.” Eve set aside her sandwich and dug in her backpack until she found another bottle of Evian water and handed it to Maggie. “He believes he is God.” She hesitated, picking up her own bottle, wrapping both hands around it, cradling it as if looking for something to hang on to. “He preys on those of us who have no clue who we are, those who are weak and searching and have nowhere else to go. He tells us what to eat, what to wear, who we can and can’t talk to, what we should believe.

“He convinces us that no one outside the church understands or loves us and that those who are not with us are against us and only want to hurt us. We’re told we must forsake family and friends and all worldly materialistic things in order to find true peace and be worthy of his love. And by this time, he’s stripped us of every single individual thing that defined us, until we are absolutely nothing without him and without his church.”

Maggie listened quietly. None of this was news. It only followed the same profile of every other cult she had read about. It simply confirmed their beliefs that Everett’s church was a bogus organization, a smoke screen for his own power-hungry maneuvers. But there was something she didn’t understand. Something she needed to ask. A hint of impatience seeped out in her question. “Why in the world does anyone join?”

“In the beginning,” Eve said in a calm voice, taking her time, appearing to be neither insulted nor intimidated by the question, “you want to believe that you’ve found a place where you finally belong. Where you’re a part of something bigger than you. In not so different ways, we’re all lost souls, looking and searching for something that’s missing in our lives. Self-identity or self-esteem—whatever you want to call it—it’s such a fragile commodity. When you have no idea who you are to begin with, it’s so easy and tempting to become your surroundings. When you feel lost and alone, sometimes you’re willing to give anything to belong. Sometimes you’re even willing to give your soul.”

Maggie fidgeted, growing weary and suspicious of the woman’s overly calm manner. It seemed too well rehearsed. Was this meeting a ploy, maybe even orchestrated by Everett to convince her the organization, though definitely screwed up, was not dangerous? Maggie was looking for a murderer, and this woman was talking like Everett’s only crime was snatching souls.

“It doesn’t sound so bad,” she told Eve, and took a sip of her water, watching the woman from the corner of her eye. “Everett takes good care of you, feeds and clothes you, makes all your decisions and gives you a place to stay free of charge. All he asks for in return is for you to indulge in his delusions of grandeur. Nope. Doesn’t sound bad to me. And quite honestly, no one can really take away your soul without your permission, can they?”

She waited out the silence, helping herself to the bag of chips left on the bench between them. Finally, the woman looked over at her, pushed her sunglasses on top of her head and examined Maggie, holding her gaze as if searching for something hidden within her. She looked older than Maggie had guessed. Now without the dark glasses, Maggie could see the wrinkles at Eve’s eyes and lines around her mouth. There was another smile, again just a twist at the corner of her mouth. It occurred to Maggie that this woman was used to keeping her expressions and emotions in check. Even her eyes refused to show any hint of feeling, though they were not cold, just empty.

Eve looked away suddenly, as if she had exposed too much, and flipped the dark glasses back down into place.

“You look a lot like her,” she said in that same even tone.

“Excuse me?”

“Kathleen. She’s your mother, isn’t she?”

“You know my mother?”

“She joined just before I escaped.”

Maggie felt herself wince at Eve’s use of the word
escape,
though she had said it as casually as if they were talking about going home after a day at work.

“Don’t think for a minute—” Eve began unbuttoning and rolling up the sleeves of her shirt as if suddenly too warm “—that there is anything harmless about Everett. He saves you, builds you up, tells you he loves you, trusts you, that you are special, a favor to him from God. Then he turns on you and rips you to shreds. He discovers your weaknesses and your fears, then uses them to humiliate you and to destroy any last piece of self-respect you think you deserve.”

With her shirtsleeves now rolled up, she held out her wrists in front of her for Maggie to see.

“He calls it being sent to the Well,” she said, her voice still annoyingly calm and level. Red welts circled both her wrists where the skin had flayed and bled from rope or handcuffs cutting into the flesh. The wounds looked recent. Eve’s head pivoted around, and she pulled the sleeves back in place, picking up her sandwich and unwrapping it to continue her lunch as though there had been no interruptions.

Again Maggie waited, this time out of respect and not impatience. She followed Eve’s lead and sipped at her own water and managed a few more chips.

“It’s an actual well,” Eve said. “Though I doubt he ever intended to use it for anything more than a punishment chamber. He knew I was terrified of the dark, closed places, so it was a perfect punishment.”

She stared out at the teenagers up on the hill, though Maggie wondered what the woman really saw. Her voice remained calm but now almost disconnected. “He had them tie me by the wrists and lower me into the well. When I kicked and clawed and tried to climb out, he had them spill buckets of spiders down on top of me. At least that’s what I think they were. It was too dark to see them. But I could feel them. I could feel them all over me. Every inch of my hair and face and skin seemed to be crawling. I couldn’t even scream anymore because I was afraid they’d crawl inside my mouth. I closed my eyes and tried to stay still, so they wouldn’t bite me as much. And for hours I tried to retreat to somewhere else inside my mind. I remember reciting an old Emily Dickinson poem over and over again in my head. It was probably the one thing that saved me from losing my mind. ‘I’m nobody. Who are you?’ Do you know it?”

“‘Are you nobody, too?’” Maggie answered with the next line of the poem.

“‘Then there’s a pair of us,’” Eve continued. “‘Don’t tell. They’d banish us.’”

“The mind’s a powerful tool,” Maggie said, thinking of her own childhood and how many times she had resorted to going away—far, far away inside her own mind.

“Everett took everything away from me but still wasn’t able to take away my mind.” Eve looked over at her and this time when she spoke there was a spark of anger. “Don’t let anyone tell you Everett is harmless. He makes them believe he only wants to take care of them while he has them sign over their homes and property, their social security and pension and child support checks. He rewards them with fear. Fear of the real world. Fear of being hunted down if they betray him. Fear of the FBI. So much fear that they’re more willing to go through his suicide drills than be captured alive.”

“Suicide drills?” Despite Eve’s story, Maggie couldn’t help thinking this didn’t sound like the man who had gotten her mother to stop drinking. All the changes she’d seen in her mother seemed so positive. “My mother doesn’t seem frightened,” she told Eve.

“He may still be looking for ways to use her. Is she living at the compound yet?”

“No. She has an apartment in Richmond and has made no mention of leaving it.” Only now did that realization bring relief to Maggie. Perhaps her mother wasn’t in too deep. She couldn’t possibly be in as much danger as this woman had been. “She loves her apartment. I doubt very much she’ll be willing to move to the compound.”

The woman shook her head and there was that smile again. “She’s more valuable to him on the outside,” she said, without looking at Maggie. “He’s hoping to find a way to use you.”

“Me?”

“Believe me, he knows Kathleen has a daughter who is an FBI agent. He knows all about you. He knows everything. It could be why he’s been so good to her. But if he finds out you’re of no use to him, or if he finds out you’re trying to hurt him…Well, just be careful. For your mother’s sake.”

“I just need to convince my mother to stay the hell away from him.”

“And, of course, she’ll listen to you because the two of you are so close.”

Maggie felt the sting of Eve’s sarcasm, despite Eve’s calm, friendly tone.

“I need to go,” the woman said, suddenly packing up her things and getting to her feet.