Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (10 page)

    
“You
mean Ruthie?” Raszer said, his eyes fixed on the stone. “Katy’s sister?”

    
“Yeah,”
said Aquino. “Maybe you won’t have the same jurisdictional problems we do. All
we ever found of Henry’s was a book about something called chaos magic. But the
best clue, Mr. Raszer—for someone smarter than me—is what we
didn’t
find . . . ”

    
Raszer
looked up and slowly closed his fingers around the stone.

    
“The
best evidence,” Aquino continued, “was on Henry Lee’s body.”

    
He spun
the file folder 180 degrees, pushed it toward Raszer, and flipped through a few
more morgue photos until he came to one detailing the midbody. Henry Lee’s uncircumcised
penis lay to the left in repose, but beneath it, there was nothing but a badly
healed scar.

    
Raszer
moved closer in. “Am I seeing what I think I’m seeing?” he asked.

    
The
cop’s eyes met Raszer’s. “He had himself neutered. And not by an expert surgeon,
either. He must’ve done it when he was in Iraq, or after, because his
predeployment physical was normal. Now, why would a man do that, Mr. Raszer?”

    
Raszer
sat back and pushed his fingers through his damp hair. He had some ideas, but
none trumped his own puzzlement. “If it
was
voluntary, I dunno. There are eunuchs all through history, mostly slaves but
occasionally saints. A whole range of stuff goes down in the transgender
sector, but the cut would have been cleaner. I can imagine a number of reasons
it might have been done
to
him,
though, especially in Iraq. Maybe he got caught messing with a local girl.
Maybe his appetite for rape didn’t start with Katy Endicott. Did you get a look
at his military record?”

    
“Nothing
but a couple of minor AWOLs and a reprimand for smoking hashish on a weekend
leave. No visits to the medic, except for a case of bronchitis.” Aquino pulled
a magnifying glass out of his drawer and handed it to Raszer. “Take a look at
that scar. According to the coroner, the wound was cauterized. See these
secondaries—here at the stem, and there? Those are burn scars. Coroner’s hunch
is, the wound was sealed with the flat side of a red-hot knife. Immediately
after the cut. If I was a crazy Arab and I’d caught him doing my sister, I don’t
think I’d bother with the post-op.”

    
“I see
what you mean,” said Raszer. “It definitely suggests procedure—either
prescribed punishment or self-mutilation.”

    
“What
about some weird religious thing, Mr. Raszer? Some kind of cult.”

    
Raszer
pulled in a breath as a substitute for the cigarette he wanted.

    
“You’re
thinking of Heaven’s Gate, the
Star Trek
castratis
. I dunno. There is one
thing that fits, but I’d like to do some work before I conjecture. I’m still
trying to get you guys to take me seriously . . . especially now that I know
you’re talking about me.”

    
Aquino
nodded. “If you come up with something, will you let me know?” he asked. “This
is still my case, and there’s not a night that it doesn’t cost me sleep.”

    
Raszer
took out a cigarette and rolled it over his fingers. “I know what that’s like,”
he said. “Like having a ghost in the house. I’m gonna grab a quick smoke.
Looking at dead people has that effect on me. Care to join me outside?”

    
During
the break, they talked only of the rain’s mixed blessing: a verdant, blossomed
spring that would lead inevitably to a summer of tinder-fueled wildfires.
Drought or deluge—in California, you were damned either way. By mid-October,
the chaparral would have reached its flash point, and flames could tear through
a town like Azusa as freely as huge boulders once had in the days before the
WPA and Army Corps of Engineers had fortified the San Gabriels with dams and
debris basins.

    
“Well,”
said Raszer, “I guess you can rest a
little
easier knowing you’ve got a chain gang up there obliged to fight the fires
 
. . . at the correctional facility.”

    
 
Aquino held the door as Raszer stepped back
inside. “I wonder about that,” he said. “I think if things got really hot,
they’d just duck the wardens and race the flames into town. I don’t like living
downwind from either nuclear plants or prison camps.”

    
“I hear
you there,” said Raszer. “But that’s the price we pay for paradise, right?”

    
Aquino
paused just inside the door, out of the desk sergeant’s earshot. “Say, let me
ask you something: You said some men do that to themselves . . . ” He made a
slicing motion across his groin. “ . . . Cut themselves voluntarily. I hear
different things from different people. Can a man still, you know,
be a man
afterwards?”

    
“I think
it depends on the man,” said Raszer. “But yeah, physiologically, he can. No
sperm cells, of course. The sultans had eunuchs guarding the harems because
they didn’t want another man’s bastard claiming the kingdom. To the degree a
man’s sex drive comes out of his gonads, it’ll cool him down, but the machinery
still works.”

    
“I’ve
been wondering,” said Aquino, “because in the Polaroids the kids took--”

    
“Polaroids?”
said Raszer, arching his eyebrow. “I’d like to see those.”

    
When
they returned to the office, they spoke of the third boy murdered on the night
of Katy Endicott’s abduction, the third of her alleged would-be rapists. He was
a high school dropout named Joseph Strunk, also from a JW family, who’d
graffitied his nickname, SKRUNK, across the free walls of a number of buildings
in Azusa. Like other aimless teens in this halfway house of a town—neither part
of L.A. nor sufficiently distinct from it to give a teenager pride of
place—he’d fallen under Johnny Horn’s spell, but unlike the others, he’d
apparently enlisted full-time in Johnny’s WARM. His file didn’t offer much else
of interest.

    
Emmett
Parrish, the boy whose account had provided the only firsthand evidence of all
three crimes—rape, murder, and kidnapping—seemed likewise a cipher, another kid
bound for oblivion, in spite of his fateful decision to opt out of the gangbang
and hide in the tall pines.

    
“I take
it you’ve gotten to know Emmett pretty well,” said Raszer.

    
“As well
as he will let me know him,” Aquino replied. “He was borderline crazy even
before all this happened. In and out of clinics and counseling centers from the
time he was five. The Witnesses don’t make it easy on kids who don’t fit in.
Church and family are one thing. They come down hard on the parents if the kids
act up, and then the parents come down hard on the kids.” He whacked the desk
for emphasis.

    
“Like
the Old Testament law that says a father’s responsible for the sins of his son
until he reaches puberty,” said Raszer.

    
“Something
like that. I belong to an evangelical Christian church, Mr. Raszer, but as far
as I’m concerned, the JWs are a cult. The Parrish kid was damaged goods. We
were lucky to get a full statement out of him that night, because after that,
he just zombied out. Even if the other three had lived and gone to trial for
rape, I’m not sure how effective a witness he would’ve been against them.”

    
“But you
do believe his account . . . ” said Raszer.

    
“I do,”
Aquino replied, “because it fits with what the rangers found at the crime
scene—and because it’s too crazy to make up.” He drummed his fingers on the
desk. “I think that night, Emmett Parrish was too scared to lie.”

    
“And too
scared to make out the Lincoln’s plates, or provide a good description of the
abductors. The men in the limo—”

    
Aquino
shook his head. “When he talks about it, it sounds like a movie. The fog, the
black suits, the whole works. But it fits with the way the necks were snapped.
The coroner said it was one for the books. Only a strand of nerve tissue left
connecting the third and fourth vertebrae. Squeeze a little harder, their heads
would have popped off.”

    
“Christ,”
said Raszer. “What are we dealing with?” He looked hard at the morgue shot of
Johnny Horn, trying to glean something—anything—from the grains of silver oxide
in the photograph. “What about links between the rave promoters and the
abductors? You’ve been through all that, I guess. No drug burns, paybacks?”

    
“The
rave promoters were two small-time crooks from Irwindale,” said Aquino. “They
basically used these dances as a methamphetamine market. They were Johnny’s
connection, and the lead dead-ended at a meth lab in Tijuana. No drug lords, no
limos.”

    
“Was the
FBI in on this? Or the DEA?”

    
“FBI,
yes. For a while. I’ll give you the field agent. You’re welcome to him.”

    
Raszer
nodded knowingly. “You know, Detective,” he said, “there are a lot of square
pegs here. For one thing, I thought the whole L.A. rave scene shut down a few
years back . . . after those girls drove their Toyota off the Angeles Crest
Highway.”

    
“Everything
comes to Azusa a few years late, Mr. Raszer—and usually tainted.”

    
“Yeah.”
Raszer sat back and sighed. “Can I take a look around up there?”

    
“Be my
guest,” said Aquino. “It’s all still there, but you probably won’t find much.
Johnny’s trailer was stripped down to the insulation, and anything not nailed
down at the old Coronado Lodge was taken into evidence. I’ll give you the
directions.” He opened his drawer and handed Raszer a business card. “If the
rangers bother you, tell them to call me. And don’t forget to buy your Adventure
Pass or they’ll ticket your Avanti.” He glanced at the wall clock. “You better
get up there before the light goes.”

    
“You’re
right,” said Raszer. “But, uh, before I do . . . can I get a look at those
Polaroids?” He nodded to the morgue photos. “I’d like to see what these two
boys looked like when they were alive and kicking. And Silas Endicott died
before he could give me a picture of his daughter, so I’d better get a look at
her.”

    
Aquino
swung around to his PC and angled the monitor toward Raszer. There was no
reason to close the mini-blinds on his north-facing window; the sky above the
mountains was as dark as factory smoke. “The actual snapshots are at the
courthouse in San Dimas,” he said, “but I had them digitized. It’s amazing what
you can do these days with this software. There’s stuff in these pictures you’d
never see in the original.”

    
“‘To see
the world in a grain of sand . . . ’”

    
“What’s
that?” Aquino asked.

    
“Nothing,”
said Raszer. “It’s a poem. It just means there’s always something hiding in
plain sight, sometimes in layers so deep, you have to think it more than see
it.”

    
“You’re
pretty philosophical for a PI,” said Aquino, with a smile. “But I guess that’s
about what I expected. I don’t think you’ll see much poetry in this freak
show.” He double-clicked on a .jpg icon and opened up a file that was, at first
glance, too murky to register.

    
“What
are we looking at?” Raszer asked.

    
“Let me
bring it up a bit,” said Aquino. “This is a little group shot, right after they
broke into the hall. Ruthie Endicott set the camera on the, uh, lectern and put
the timer on, then ran back into the picture. That’s why she’s blurred. Too bad
these kids couldn’t afford a digital camera.”

    
“Give me
the chronology,” Raszer said, leaning forward. “This is two summers ago, in
August, right?”

    
“August
ninth,” Aquino affirmed.

    
“August
ninth,” Raszer repeated.

    
Aquino
nodded. “August ninth . . . the anniversary of the Manson murders.”

    
Raszer
cocked one eyebrow. “Okay. And give me their ages at this time.”

    
Detective
Aquino took a pen from the coffee cup on his desk and went down the line,
identifying the four children of the apocalypse, one by one.

    
“This is
Henry Lee, twenty, in living color,” he began. “He’s got his pants on here, but
soon you’ll see what’s left of the family jewels in action.”

    
The
defiant cockscomb of orange hair stood high on Lee’s head. He was naked to the
waist, and the tattoo on his breast was clearly visible. In his left hand was a
can of spray paint, and he was grinning for the camera.

    
Aquino
moved his pointer right. “And here we have Johnny Jihad in all his glory.
Twenty-two. Notice the T-shirt. You can bet he didn’t buy that in downtown
Azusa.”