The Soul Catcher (46 page)

J
ustin’s hands were still shaking when he got back to the bus. He hadn’t bothered to wait for the rest of them. He still couldn’t believe this was what Father had meant by an initiation trip. He imagined it to be some test of survival like his so-called week alone in the woods. Or some marathon lecture series like their weekend revival meetings. But, Jesus! He had never imagined something like this.

He felt sick to his stomach, remembering that poor woman vomiting and all those screams. He yanked off his cap and wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his arm. The bus was empty. Thank God! Though he could see Dave, their driver, inside the McDonald’s, keeping an eye on things as he probably wolfed down an illicit Big Mac.

Justin slumped into one of the seats, crossing his arms over his chest and trying to stop shaking. He was sweating up a storm, so why was he shivering like he was cold? Fuck! He couldn’t get those screams out of his head. Those poor women. That wasn’t the way his grandfather had taught him to treat women. Even his dad could be an asshole sometimes, but he was good to Justin’s mom. No woman deserved to be treated that way. He didn’t care what the hell Father’s instructions were.

While he handed out Quarter Pounders and beer, Brandon had told them that they were about to learn an important lesson. All Justin had cared about was that finally he had some decent food and that being a warrior wasn’t such a bad thing. He’d hardly paid attention to what Brandon was saying. He must have eaten three Quarter Pounders and drunk four or five beers.

He had been feeling a pleasant buzz by the time Brandon led them to the park, where he continued his lecture about how they needed to put all bitches in their place, make them understand that men were still in power. He said women were the reason everything was going so haywire in the world. Women thought they didn’t need men, were off being lesbos, having babies on their own, taking good jobs away from family men and then crying to the government to protect them. The sluts and whores were responsible for spreading AIDS. They needed to be punished. They needed to be taught a lesson.

They sprayed the first woman who came by with beer, and Justin remembered laughing at her. By the third woman, they were grabbing and fondling and ripping. Her screams shook Justin as if waking him from a nightmare. He couldn’t believe what he was doing. That was when he started to think about Alice. What if Alice had been one of the women walking through that park? What if the others knew about her past? Jesus! Would they swarm her like a pack of wolves?

No one had seen him slip behind the trees to vomit up all those precious hamburgers. He stayed there, and when they were finished with the third woman and heading for a fourth, Justin helped her away, trying to make up for his part in the nightmare. When he knew she was safe, he left, sneaking back to the bus, still hearing the laughter and the screams ringing in his ears.

He didn’t want to think about it. He brought his knees up and hugged them to his chest. He needed to think about something, anything else.

He had only been to Boston once before when Eric was still at Brown. It had been one of their last family trips together. They had stayed at the Radisson. He and Eric had even gotten a room to themselves. Their dad let them order room service, which blew them away because he’d always been so tight with money.

They spent one day at a Red Sox game, then the Metropolitan Museum to satisfy his mom. But even that didn’t suck. It had actually been a good time, one of the few that hadn’t ended in a huge argument of some kind. It had left Justin with good feelings about Boston; feelings that now were replaced with sounds of women’s screams for help and the smell of warm beer.

He jumped off the seat and into the aisle, pulling off his T-shirt, wadding it up and kicking it under seat. Then he peeled off the rest of his clothes until he was standing in the bus aisle, wearing only his jockey shorts. That was when he saw Brandon standing in the bus’s door, staring at him. But instead of getting angry, Brandon started laughing.

“I knew it,” he finally said as Justin wrestled back into his blue jeans. “I knew you didn’t have the stomach for this. You’re a coward, just like your fucking brother, Eric. I need to get back and finish things like a real man.”

Then he turned and left, heading toward the park.

J
ustin’s hands were still shaking when he got back to the bus. He hadn’t bothered to wait for the rest of them. He still couldn’t believe this was what Father had meant by an initiation trip. He imagined it to be some test of survival like his so-called week alone in the woods. Or some marathon lecture series like their weekend revival meetings. But, Jesus! He had never imagined something like this.

He felt sick to his stomach, remembering that poor woman vomiting and all those screams. He yanked off his cap and wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his arm. The bus was empty. Thank God! Though he could see Dave, their driver, inside the McDonald’s, keeping an eye on things as he probably wolfed down an illicit Big Mac.

Justin slumped into one of the seats, crossing his arms over his chest and trying to stop shaking. He was sweating up a storm, so why was he shivering like he was cold? Fuck! He couldn’t get those screams out of his head. Those poor women. That wasn’t the way his grandfather had taught him to treat women. Even his dad could be an asshole sometimes, but he was good to Justin’s mom. No woman deserved to be treated that way. He didn’t care what the hell Father’s instructions were.

While he handed out Quarter Pounders and beer, Brandon had told them that they were about to learn an important lesson. All Justin had cared about was that finally he had some decent food and that being a warrior wasn’t such a bad thing. He’d hardly paid attention to what Brandon was saying. He must have eaten three Quarter Pounders and drunk four or five beers.

He had been feeling a pleasant buzz by the time Brandon led them to the park, where he continued his lecture about how they needed to put all bitches in their place, make them understand that men were still in power. He said women were the reason everything was going so haywire in the world. Women thought they didn’t need men, were off being lesbos, having babies on their own, taking good jobs away from family men and then crying to the government to protect them. The sluts and whores were responsible for spreading AIDS. They needed to be punished. They needed to be taught a lesson.

They sprayed the first woman who came by with beer, and Justin remembered laughing at her. By the third woman, they were grabbing and fondling and ripping. Her screams shook Justin as if waking him from a nightmare. He couldn’t believe what he was doing. That was when he started to think about Alice. What if Alice had been one of the women walking through that park? What if the others knew about her past? Jesus! Would they swarm her like a pack of wolves?

No one had seen him slip behind the trees to vomit up all those precious hamburgers. He stayed there, and when they were finished with the third woman and heading for a fourth, Justin helped her away, trying to make up for his part in the nightmare. When he knew she was safe, he left, sneaking back to the bus, still hearing the laughter and the screams ringing in his ears.

He didn’t want to think about it. He brought his knees up and hugged them to his chest. He needed to think about something, anything else.

He had only been to Boston once before when Eric was still at Brown. It had been one of their last family trips together. They had stayed at the Radisson. He and Eric had even gotten a room to themselves. Their dad let them order room service, which blew them away because he’d always been so tight with money.

They spent one day at a Red Sox game, then the Metropolitan Museum to satisfy his mom. But even that didn’t suck. It had actually been a good time, one of the few that hadn’t ended in a huge argument of some kind. It had left Justin with good feelings about Boston; feelings that now were replaced with sounds of women’s screams for help and the smell of warm beer.

He jumped off the seat and into the aisle, pulling off his T-shirt, wadding it up and kicking it under seat. Then he peeled off the rest of his clothes until he was standing in the bus aisle, wearing only his jockey shorts. That was when he saw Brandon standing in the bus’s door, staring at him. But instead of getting angry, Brandon started laughing.

“I knew it,” he finally said as Justin wrestled back into his blue jeans. “I knew you didn’t have the stomach for this. You’re a coward, just like your fucking brother, Eric. I need to get back and finish things like a real man.”

Then he turned and left, heading toward the park.

C
alm. He needed to stay calm and let the liquid course through his veins. Let it do its magic. Already he could feel its strength, its power.

Not that he needed much physical strength. The woman was small, easy to drag. And with the noise and excitement still going on close by, no one would notice the rustling of leaves and snapping of twigs.

But he needed to hurry. He needed to find a more isolated area. The sun was sinking behind the buildings. He didn’t have much time to set up, to get ready. Tonight would be different. He could feel it. Tonight would be the night. Somehow he just knew it.

He stopped, turned and waited while he stared at the woman’s half-naked body, leaves and brush dragging along between her legs. He smiled when he finally saw her exposed chest move just slightly, shallow breaths, barely noticeable. Oh, good. She was still alive. Then he continued dragging her. Yes, tonight he felt quite certain it would happen. He would finally see it tonight.

C
alm. He needed to stay calm and let the liquid course through his veins. Let it do its magic. Already he could feel its strength, its power.

Not that he needed much physical strength. The woman was small, easy to drag. And with the noise and excitement still going on close by, no one would notice the rustling of leaves and snapping of twigs.

But he needed to hurry. He needed to find a more isolated area. The sun was sinking behind the buildings. He didn’t have much time to set up, to get ready. Tonight would be different. He could feel it. Tonight would be the night. Somehow he just knew it.

He stopped, turned and waited while he stared at the woman’s half-naked body, leaves and brush dragging along between her legs. He smiled when he finally saw her exposed chest move just slightly, shallow breaths, barely noticeable. Oh, good. She was still alive. Then he continued dragging her. Yes, tonight he felt quite certain it would happen. He would finally see it tonight.

M
aggie drove with the windows rolled down, hoping it would squelch the churning in the pit of her stomach. As she drove, she tried to make sense of all that she had learned from the woman called Eve about the Reverend Joseph Everett. She needed to prepare herself before she confronted her mother. She’d need to arm herself with information for when her mother started to defend the man, because Maggie knew her mother would defend him.

She tried to put aside the horrible images Eve had conjured up. Instead, she should concentrate on the facts. Most of her arsenal of facts was general biographical stuff. As a young man, Everett had been kicked out of the army, an honorable discharge with no further explanation. There was no police record, despite the rape charge that was later dropped by the journalism student herself. At thirty-five he ran for the Virginia state senate and lost. Then three years later he started the Church of Spiritual Freedom, a nonprofit organization that allowed him to amass stockpiles of tax-free donations. Everett finally found his calling, but there seemed to be no information on where or if he had actually been ordained as a minister.

In less than ten short years, the Church of Spiritual Freedom claimed more than five hundred members with almost two hundred of them living on a compound he had built in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. Ironically, the area was only a few miles from where the journalism student had been raped twenty-seven years earlier. Everett had either been innocent and had nothing to hide, or perhaps, Maggie couldn’t help thinking, he was superstitious and didn’t think lightning could strike in the same place twice.

If it was the latter, he had good reason to believe it. In the past ten years, he and his church had not been in any kind of trouble with the law—no IRS audits, no weapons violations, no building permit or zoning violations. The illegal-weapons summon at the Massachusetts cabin was the first violation, and even that could only loosely be connected to Everett’s church. In fact, everything seemed to be going quite nicely for the good reverend. He had even made some close and powerful friends in Congress, permitting him to buy a parcel of government land in Colorado for a sinfully low price. If things were going so well, why did he want to uproot and move to Colorado?

Maggie wasn’t certain what her mother’s involvement was with Everett and his so-called church. One thing Maggie did feel certain about, however, was that the man could be a time bomb waiting to explode. And despite only circumstantial evidence, she knew he was somehow involved in, at least, Ginny Brier’s death and possibly the floater in North Carolina. It was too much of a coincidence that these women died while Everett’s rallies were taking place just footsteps away. As for the nameless transient, well, she was still a mystery.

The crisp autumn air chilled her, but she kept the windows down. She took deep breaths, filling her lungs with the scent of pine and the exhaust fumes of the traffic on I-95. She’d need to have all her senses on alert and in overdrive for this mission. Even without a confrontation, being in the same room with her mother was difficult enough. There were too many memories. Too much past left behind, and that’s just the way Maggie preferred it.

It had been more than a year since she had visited her mother’s apartment, although she doubted her mother would remember that visit. How could she remember? She had been passed out for most of it. Now Maggie wondered how she would begin to explain this visit. What did she think she could do, just drop by and say, “Gee, Mom, I was passing through and thought I’d stop and see how you were? Oh, and by the way, did you realize your precious Reverend Everett may be a dangerous maniac?” No, somehow she didn’t think that would get her anywhere.

Maggie tried to put aside what she had learned in the FBI file and what she had just learned from Eve. Instead, she tried to remember everything in the past year that her mother may have told her about Reverend Joseph Everett. She was embarrassed to admit that she hadn’t paid much attention. In the beginning she had simply been relieved that there was someone else to watch over her mother. Months went by without a suicide attempt, and Maggie hoped that the woman had finally found a less destructive addiction. Perhaps she had finally found a way to get the attention she so craved, and it didn’t include a trip to the ER.

Later, when she discovered that her mother had stopped drinking, Maggie was skeptical. It seemed too good to be true. There had to be a catch. And, of course, there was one. The sudden sobriety had changed the habits but hadn’t changed Kathleen O’Dell’s personality. She was still as selfish, needy and narrow-minded as she had always been, only now Maggie couldn’t explain it away as drunken drivel.

It didn’t make sense that her mother had suddenly found God. Maggie could count on one hand the times her mother had insisted they attend mass. Her entire childhood, she couldn’t remember her mother doing or saying anything that could remotely be misconstrued as religious.

The only time Maggie remembered her mother mentioning religion was when she was drunk, often times joking that she was a recovering Catholic from which there was no cure. Then she would snort and laugh, telling anyone who would listen that being a little bit Catholic was like being a little bit pregnant.

For Kathleen O’Dell, being a Catholic was something she had held on to simply as a party favor. Which led Maggie to believe that Everett’s Bible-thumping would probably be lost on the woman. In the last several months, she had not heard her mother suddenly start spouting off psalms or scripture. There certainly hadn’t been a miraculous religious conversion. At least not one Maggie could see.

What she did see was the same compulsive, judgmental, addictive woman finally finding someone or something to blame for all her hardships and bad luck. And Reverend Everett provided for her the sinister, evil culprit in the form of the United States government, a faceless entity, an easy target as long as Kathleen O’Dell could reason that her daughter was not a part of that entity.

Now that Maggie thought about it, why would she find it odd that her mother be attracted to Everett’s brand of religion, to Everett’s version of reality? After all, hadn’t Kathleen O’Dell spent years worshipping at the altar of BCD: Beam, Ceurvo and Daniel’s? There had been times in the past when the woman would have sold her soul for a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Just because she was no longer drinking didn’t necessarily mean her soul was no longer for sale. She had handed in one skewed sense of reality for a different one, one addiction for another.

Maggie could understand the seductive lure for her mother, whose version of current events came from the
National Enquirer
or watching
Hard Copy.
What a rush it must now be for her to believe that she had the inside scoop on national issues; that she was respected and trusted by someone with the charisma and charm of the good reverend; and that she could have the easy answers to questions so many people spent a lifetime in search of.

She had heard some of those answers, the paranoid delusions that men like Reverend Everett spread. There was power in hate, and control by fear was one of the most successful manipulations. Why had Maggie shrugged off her mother’s comments about chemicals in her drinking water, hidden government cameras in ATM machines and oh, yes, several weeks ago a hysteria about not wanting to talk to Maggie if she was calling on her cellular phone because “they had ways of listening in to those conversations?”

Why hadn’t she seen the danger signs long ago? Or had she seen them but been so relieved to no longer be picking up the shattered pieces her mother left behind that she didn’t care, or that she simply didn’t want to know?

Somewhere Maggie had read that alcohol only emphasized an alcoholic’s personality, bringing out and highlighting characteristics that already existed. It made sense with her mother. The alcohol only seemed to make her more needy, more hungry for attention. Yet, if that was indeed true, Maggie realized the irony in her own drinking habits. She usually drank to forget the empty feeling inside her, and to not feel so alone. If the alcohol only emphasized those very same things, then no wonder she was so fucked up.

Like mother, like daughter.

Maggie shook her head, trying to prevent the memory.

You two could be sisters. I never fucked a mother and daughter before.

Those goddamn crumbling walls. She grabbed the Pepsi can in her cup holder and gulped the warm, flat remainder. Why was it that she could not remember the sound of her father’s voice, but she could still feel this stranger’s breath on her face? With little effort, she could smell the sour odor of whiskey and feel the scrape of his beard as he pinned her small body to the wall and tried to kiss her. She remembered his hands fondling her preadolescent breasts, laughing and telling her he bet she was “gonna have some big tits just like her mama.”

And all the while her mother stood back with her glass of Jack Daniel’s, watching and telling him to cut it out but not making him stop. She didn’t make him stop. Why didn’t she make him stop?

Somehow Maggie had escaped on her own. She couldn’t even remember how. That was when her mother started insisting her men friends take her to a hotel. She stayed out all night, sometimes was gone for days at a time, leaving Maggie home alone. Alone. It was good to be alone, a little scary but less painful. She had learned early on how to be a survivor. Being alone was simply the price of survival.

As she approached Richmond, she started paying attention and watching for her exit. She tried to ignore the growing nausea in the pit of her stomach and was annoyed that it was there at all. What the hell was wrong with her? She chased killers for a living, examined their gruesome handiwork and traveled into their worlds of evil. What could be so difficult about one goddamn visit to her mother’s?