The Soul Catcher Page 23

  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.

  CHAPTER 50

  Calm. 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.

  CHAPTER 51

  Maggie 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?

  CHAPTER 52

  Richmond, Virginia

  Kathleen O’Dell finished packing the last of her grandmother’s porcelain figurines. The man from Al and Frank’s Antiques and Secondhand Treasures would be picking them up in the morning with the other items. Now she couldn’t remember if the man’s name was even Al or Frank, although he had told her, while he appraised her things, that he was one of the co-owners.

  It bothered her that she felt sad about giving up the items. She still remembered her grandmother letting her handle the figurines when she was just a child, allowing her to gently turn them around in her small hands in order to admire and touch them.

  Several of the figurines had come over with her grandmother from Ireland, stuffed in an old suitcase with few other belongings. They were a part of her family’s heritage, and it seemed wrong to sell them for something as meaningless as money. But then, Reverend Everett constantly reminded them that they needed to divorce themselves from the materialism of the world in order to be truly free. That it was sinful to admire and covet material items even if they held some sentimental value.

  More important, Kathleen knew she couldn’t very well cart all these things with her when they left for their new paradise in Colorado. Besides, she wouldn’t need them. Reverend Everett had promised that everything would be provided for them, their every need and desire would be attended to. She hoped that meant it would be much cleaner and luxurious than the compound. Most of the time the place smelled bad. And on her last trip there, she could swear she had seen a rat scurrying along the side of the conference hall. She hated rats.

  She left the boxes and walked through the rooms, looking to see if she had forgotten any of the items she had agreed to sell to the man from Al and Frank’s. The man whose name she couldn’t remember. She decided she would miss this apartment, though she hadn’t lived here very long. It was one of the few places she had bothered to decorate and make into a home. And it was one of the few places that didn’t remind her how trapped and alone she could feel. Although some evenings nothing could prevent her from feeling the walls closing in on her.

  She told herself that it would be nice to live in a community where her new friends lived just across the hall. But hopefully not Emily. Dear God, Emily’s constant complaining would drive her nuts if she had to live across the hall from the woman. It would also be nice to have people she could talk to, rather than spending her evenings answering Regis Philbin’s million-dollar questions. Yes, she was tired of being alone, and she certainly didn’t want to grow old alone. So if the price was a few rare figurines her grandmother had willed to her, then so be it. It wasn’t like those silly things had done anything for her lately.

  There was a knock at the door, and for a moment she wondered if perhaps she had gotten the days mixed up. Was it possible the man from Al and Frank’s meant to come today and not tomorrow? She’d just have to tell him that she’d changed her mind. That’s what she would do. She couldn’t possibly sell them to him today. She needed time, after all, to get used to the idea.

  She opened the door, ready to say just that, and found herself staring at her daughter, instead.

  “Maggie? What on earth are you doing here?”

  “Sorry I didn’t call.”

  “What’s wrong? Did something happen? Is Greg okay?”

  She saw Maggie flinch. It was the wrong thing to say. Why did her daughter always have to make her feel like she was saying the wrong thing?

  “Nothing’s wrong, but I do need to talk to you. Is it okay if I come in?”

  “Oh, sure.” She opened the door and waved her in. “The place is a mess.”

>   “Are you moving?” Maggie walked over to the stacked boxes.

  Thank God the boxes weren’t labeled. Her daughter would never understand about the materialism and divorcing it to feel free or not coveting, or whatever it was…Oh, it didn’t matter. Maggie would never understand, and no one outside the church was supposed to know about Colorado.

  “I’m just cleaning out some old stuff.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  Maggie gave up her questioning and stood at the window, looking out over the parking lot. Kathleen couldn’t help wondering if the girl already wanted to escape. Well, it wasn’t like it was a day at the circus for her, either. At least, she didn’t expect anything from Maggie. Not anymore, that is.

  “Would you like some iced tea?”

  “Only if it’s no trouble.”

  “I just brewed some. It’s raspberry. Is that okay?” But she didn’t wait for an answer. She retreated to her small kitchen, hoping its cozy warmth would soothe her nerves.

  When she reached for the tall iced tea glasses, she noticed a bottle in the far corner of the cupboard. She had forgotten she even had it. It was for emergencies. She hesitated, then stretched to grab it. This was feeling like an emergency day. First her grandmother’s figurines and now an unexpected visit from her daughter.

  She poured a quarter of a glass for herself, closed her eyes and gulped it, savoring the burning sensation sliding down her throat and all the way to her stomach. What a wonderful, warm feeling. She had another, then filled her glass one last time about halfway, tucked the bottle back into its hiding place, and poured iced tea in to fill the rest of the glass. The tea was almost the same color.