Deadline (25 page)

“And what if she doesn’t want to come?” Janice asked.

Crowley waved his hands to indicate that this was of no concern. “It is not her decision to make any more than it is mine. This is the will of God.”

Janice swallowed. She could sense that she was running out of time here. “Isn’t it supposed to be a sin to claim to know the mind of God?”

Crowley’s expression darkened. “Sin,” he said, “is something about which I know more than any man alive. It is my sacred duty to purge sin to make souls worthy to stand in the presence of God. It is time that you learned something about the true nature of sin. It stains both the body and mind. Only through great trial and suffering might we wipe that stain away.”

He walked over and knelt back down next to her, grabbing her chin forcefully with his hand. She tried to shake loose, but he wouldn’t let go.

“Today is the most glorious day of your life,” he said. “Today you shall be purged of your sins. You will be pure. Today, you will see God in all his glory.”

Janice tried to think of something to say, but nothing was coming to mind. Crowley waved to the other cloaked figures. “Bring her to the altar!”

The largest figure at the front, the one Janice was sure she recognized, took a step forward and then stopped suddenly at the unmistakable sound of a gun being cocked. A familiar voice came out of the darkness.

“Stay right there, asshole. Any of you fucking nutbars move and I’ll send you on an express train to Jesus myself.”

C
olin stepped forward holding the Glock. He hoped the relative darkness would keep everyone else from noticing how badly his hands were shaking.

From the outside, the place had looked like an abandoned farmhouse. All of the doors and windows were boarded up. Colin had circled the place twice before he found the wooden storm doors that led down into the basement. They were painted a charcoal brown and blended in so easily with the surrounding ground that he actually stepped on them before he saw them.

The doors led to a narrow stone stairway that led him deep under the house. He followed the sound of voices through the darkness. The place smelled like an abattoir.

Crowley stood up as Colin entered the room. He looked older than Colin had pictured, but that in no way detracted from his intimidating presence. The guy was tall. It was hard to tell just how big he was under the cloak, but he had a rangy look in his eyes that immediately set Colin even more on edge. The guy had the air of a hunted animal—the kind that’s learned to survive by becoming a better predator than its enemies.

Colin scanned the others quickly and immediately recognized the tall one at the front. Now that they were standing in the same room, the resemblance the younger one had to his father was uncanny.

“I know you,” Colin said. “You’re on Ludnick’s security staff. Your name’s Gus. I guess that’s short for Augustine. Augustine Levant.”

The man, who Colin guessed was in his early twenties, looked anxiously at his father, who appeared to betray not the slightest concern that Colin was there. Like all followers, these ones appeared incapable of making a decision without their leader. At least, Colin hoped that was the case.

“I’m guessing you’re the one I chased through the basement of the rec centre,” Colin said. “The one who stuck Devane’s body in the locker. The old man get you to do a lot of the grunt work, does he?”

“Welcome, brother,” Crowley said, spreading his hands. “We give great thanks for your timely arrival.”

“Save it for Sunday,” Colin said, gesturing towards Janice. “Untie her.”

Crowley smiled, giving Colin the same view of his dental regimen that Janice had gotten. “Or what? You’ll shoot me? Anything you could possibly threaten to do is inconsequential when compared to what I would face if I contravened God’s will.”

“It’s not God’s will, it’s mine,” Colin said. “Be advised: I already shot one guy today and, although he was a corrupt and maggoty excuse for a sentient life form, you’re a
much
more deserving target.” Colin was careful to stand out of striking distance of either Crowley or the others. He had seen what these guys were capable of.

“We are not so different,” Crowley said. “We both seek to right the wrongs of others. The only difference between us is that my methods are far more effective than yours.”

“That and the fact that you literally carve people up and I only do it metaphorically,” Colin said. “Now untie her.”

Crowley shook his head. “I cannot do that.”

Colin considered his position. Actually shooting Crowley was tricky and all hell would break loose. If he missed, the bullet might ricochet off the floor or the walls and hit Janice or himself. Hell, at this range, the bullet might even pass right through Crowley and do the same thing. He raised the gun and pointed it at Crowley’s head.

“I’m not going to count,” Colin said. “And I’m not going to ask again.”

“Very well,” Crowley said. “Rebecca.”

For a fraction of a second, Colin wondered why Crowley was calling him Rebecca. It was the same fraction of a second it took Janice to open her mouth and yell “Colin, look out!”

It was a fraction of a second too long.

C
olin felt a sudden excruciating pain as the nail lodged in his shoulder blade.

The Glock fell out of his hand and clattered on the floor. Colin tried to turn around to see who had stabbed him, but ended up tripping over his own feet and hitting the floor himself. He was lucky to fall on his left side so as to avoid driving the nail through his shoulder blade and into his lung. He managed to twist around to see what looked like an 18-year-old girl staring at him with a horribly vacant expression.

Crowley stepped forward and picked up the gun, shoving it absently into one of the pockets of his cloak.

“This is my daughter, Rebecca,” he said, gesturing to the girl. “Until last year, she was being kept in a home for what they call behaviourally challenged children. Have you ever heard of anything more ridiculous? She ran away from five foster homes because she was trying to find her way back to her true family. She was supposed to be participating in a later part of the ritual, but I believe she has just proved herself ready.”

He put his hand on the girl’s head. She closed her eyes and bowed her head towards the floor. “Father.”

Crowley leaned over and yanked the nail out of Colin’s shoulder. It hurt as much coming out as it had going in and he let out a screech of pain.

“Savour your pain, my son,” he said, looking at Colin. “It is the same pain felt by the one who will deliver you from this place of darkness.” He motioned to the others. “Bring him.”

Colin felt himself lifted up and carried across the room. His right arm was totally useless and Crowley had his left in a vice-like grip. He wrenched his left foot loose and kicked out blindly, connecting with something soft. He heard a thump and looked down to see the security guard, Gus, land heavily on the floor.

“Quickly!” Crowley shouted as the guard’s place was taken up by another blank-faced son who was almost as large.

Colin writhed and protested, but there were too many of them. He felt himself lifted up and dropped down forcefully on a skinny table. He looked down to see that it wasn’t a table, but a cross. Gus reappeared and threw a chain over Colin’s ankles, cinching it tight to hold them in place while his brother moved up to take hold of Colin’s left wrist. Crowley handed the nail to Rebecca and showed her where to position it on Colin’s lower arm before reaching down to pick up the sledgehammer.

Colin struggled wildly to free his arm, but the security guard was much too strong and Colin didn’t have any leverage. Colin looked down to see one of the other kids approaching him. She was holding some sort of metal bowl up over her head. Colin managed to lift his left knee and started working to get his foot loose.

“Suffering is the path to salvation,” Crowley intoned.

The girl reached the bottom of the altar. Colin managed to get his left leg free and caught her with a glancing kick that knocked her off balance. The bowl tipped over, spraying her with what looked like blood. A lot of blood.

“Hold him!” Crowley yelled.

Colin felt himself grabbed on all sides. As hard as he tried, he couldn’t get his other leg or his arm free. Crowley raised the sledgehammer. He could feel the cold tip of the nail pressing down on the soft flesh of his inner arm.

“Only in blood shall we wash away our sins!” Crowley yelled.

Colin wasn’t sure, but he thought he heard somebody else yell something at almost the same time. Crowley didn’t take any notice. His eyes were wild, his face a mask of fervent devotion. He brought the hammer all the way up and tensed to bring it down with as much force as he could muster.

At which point, two 9 mm slugs tore off most of the left side of his skull.

Colin watched with almost dreamlike detachment as Crowley collapsed like a marionette, dropping the hammer on the floor, where it landed with a distant, echoing clang. It was the last thing Colin was consciously aware of before he passed out.

G
iordino was sitting at the end of Colin’s hospital bed when he woke up.

It took him a second to figure out where he was. His mouth was dry and his shoulder was tightly bandaged. Everything else seemed to be intact. There was an IV line running into his left arm that he guessed was feeding him some sort of analgesic to reduce the pain in his shoulder to a dull throb. He tried moving his right arm to reach for a cup of water and regretted it immediately.

Giordino jumped up out of her chair and got the water for him, holding the cup forward so that he could suck some of it through a white bendable straw.

“Thanks, detective,” he said as he angled his head back down. “Good thing you answered the phone.”

“How are you feeling?” Giordino asked.

Colin took a deep breath. Even breathing was painful. “Like a death cult tried to kill me. You here to arrest me?”

Giordino smiled and sat back down. She reached into her briefcase and pulled out the Fresh Start prospectus. “Not exactly. I won’t ask how you managed to get your hands on this. Or the file you sent.”

Colin stared up at the ceiling. “You know, that’s probably a good thing. I’m pretty sure I’m suffering from some sort of post-traumatic stress disorder, of which one of the key symptoms is memory loss.”

“Crowley’s dead.”

“That part I remember.”

“It looks like he spent most of the last 12 years bouncing around the country trying to track down and round up his kids,” Giordino said, pulling out another folder. “We know where they were placed. In some cases, they were runaways and in others, the adoptive family appears to have disappeared. One case was a fire, another was an apparent car accident. One family just vanished. Every homicide department in those jurisdictions is now going through their cold cases looking for anything that might match Crowley’s M.O. So far, we’ve turned up three probables.”

“I’m sure you’ll find more,” Colin said. “Crowley doesn’t strike me as the type of guy who believed in taking time off.”

“We have the rest of the family in custody,” Giordino said. “We’re still trying to determine how Crowley managed to stay off the radar for all those years.”

“He said something about there being more of them,” Colin said. “More members of his cult, that is. He hinted that they had helped him hide out.
We are legion
is what I think he said. It was kind of hard to tell if he was just spouting off or if he was serious.”

Giordino held up the Knights of the Holy Thorn manifesto document that Janice had printed out. It was sealed in a clear plastic evidence bag.

“Mind telling me when you were planning to let the rest of us in on this little research project of yours?” she asked.

“I was just on my way to do that when this last-minute thing came up,” Colin said. “It seemed pretty improbable at the time. Not so much now.”

“Doctor said that nail did quite the number on your shoulder. You were in surgery for a good couple of hours. He said if it had gone in two centimetres to the left, it would have punctured the main coronary artery.”

“Well, that’s a comforting thought.”

Giordino shook her head in disbelief. “So you mind telling me how in the hell you managed to track this guy down before we did?”

Colin motioned for some more water. Giordino got up and helped him with the cup.

“Thanks,” he said. “It all started with the prison plan. Devries and some of his well-connected buddies got together to try and figure out how to get their hands on some of the giant pipeline of federal money that was going to come running through the town. It might even have been legit at some stage. However much it was, it wasn’t enough for Devries. He and his cabinet minister buddy must have gotten together and decided to start sweeping names onto the list
en masse
.”

“They couldn’t have done that on their own,” Giordino said.

“No,” Colin said. “I’m guessing that’s probably where guys like your partner would come in handy. When I tried to look up Devane’s record, it had been deleted. Only somebody on the inside could have done that. How is your partner, by the way?”

“He sustained a skull fracture,” Giordino said. “He’s in a medically-induced coma until they can bring down the pressure on his brain.”

“Probably the first time it’s been under any,” Colin muttered. “Anyway, Devries swept thousands of names onto that list. Some of them are still in prison. Some of them are probably dead. The more names on the list, the more money he got. I’m guessing it was a secret account that only the president had access to. The legitimate ones weren’t exactly model students. Most of them never showed up. And the ones who did were not exactly rehabilitated.”

“Like Devane.”

“Right,” Colin said. “I think that’s where Ludnick came in. It was his job to keep the whole thing quiet. If any complaints or issues arose with any of the students—if I can call them that—associated with the program, it was his job to make sure it went away as quickly and quietly as possible. Devane was kicked out for crushing a kid’s hand in a lift jack. Well, kicked out in the sense that he was told not to come back. His name stayed on the class lists.”