Righteous03 - The Wicked (3 page)

“That’s different. I have a place to go. What are you still doing in Nevada? And living in Las Vegas? Is there a more godless place on the face of the earth?”

He raised his eyebrows. “You’re wrong about Vegas. It’s a spiritual vacuum, Liz, and anything and everything is flowing in to fill it. New Age quacks, UFO cults, evangelical offshoots, snake handlers, you name it. Oh, and plenty of former polygs. They seem to find their way into every weird sect imaginable.”

“Just tell me you’re not hanging out with other Lost Boys.”

“No, I’m not that dumb. I heard what happened when they tried to come back. Half those guys are in jail or dead. I’m damn lucky I stayed out of their schemes. Whatever else I am, I’m a Christianson boy, not a Kimball.”

She breathed a sigh of relief. “Good.” Eliza didn’t want to think too hard about Kimballs or the hell they’d put her through. “David, you have two choices. You can follow Jacob’s path, or you can follow Enoch’s. And Enoch is dead.”

The bartender brought another drink and David took a long sip before fixing Eliza with a hard look. “Liz, we all die sooner or later. Jacob is going to be dead soon, too. If you don’t get away from all these religious crazies so will you.”

Chapter Three:

The woman couldn’t have stood out more if she’d ridden into the compound on the back of an elephant. She wore a short skirt and a sleeveless shirt. Hair in a fashionable mid-neck length, brown with highlights. And makeup, plus jewelry, the most noticeable of which were gold hoops that glittered in the sun. Maybe mid-forties, beautiful. Slender and athletic, like someone who watched her calories and went to the gym every morning.

Eliza joined the other women in looking up from the raised vegetable beds as the woman clicked across flagstones on high heels. She had a proud, confident air and strode toward them with a look of purpose. “Excuse me, I’m looking for Eliza Christianson.”

Eliza grew wary. Just what she needed, another reporter.

Women wiped sweat from foreheads with the backs of gloves, or brushed dirt from their dresses. Nobody answered. It was an unseasonably warm week in central Utah for late April, and they were taking advantage of the sun to mix compost into the new beds.

The woman fixed Eliza, dressed differently as she was, in jeans and a long-sleeved blouse, and said, “How about you?” She shielded her hand against her eyes to block the sun. “Do you know how to find Eliza Christianson? That’s not you, is it?”

Not again.
Why couldn’t Jacob have spotted the woman driving up and shooed her away? But Jacob was giving booster shots to children in his clinic at the back side of the compound. Most of the other men were brush hogging the irrigation ditches up in the hills.

“Nope, never heard of her. You sure you have the right place?”

“It
is
you, I recognize you from TV.”

“What do you want?”

The woman moved around where the sun wasn’t in her eyes. “I want to talk to you about your
Dateline
show.”

“That wasn’t me.”

“It was you, I’m sure now.” She glanced at the other women. “Can we talk privately?”

“What I mean is that I had nothing to do with that. They wanted to interview me, I told them no. I know they found a couple of people who kind of sort of knew me, paid them a bunch of money to act like they really
did
know me, and then made up a bunch of stuff. But whoever you are, I don’t want to be in the news. So no, that’s not me. Find someone else to interview, please.”

“Interview, what do you mean?” She looked down, seemed to notice how she must appear to the women from the compound. “Oh, I understand. No, I’m not with the news at all. I didn’t come to interview you, I’m in terrible trouble and I think you can help.”

“Oh, you didn’t?” Eliza felt herself softening. “Sorry, I thought—well, what do you mean, help?”

“It’s my daughter. She’s dying, and I think you can save her.”

#

“I don’t like it,” the woman said. “Can’t we meet alone?”

She’d introduced herself as Allison Caliari, said she was from Portland, Oregon. Jacob and Eliza had followed her down from the compound to a diner in the small town of Manti, Utah. It wasn’t one of those retro places like you found in Salt Lake, with an art deco look and waitresses in pinstriped dresses, but the real kind, with vinyl seats split and worn by ten thousand backsides. A short order cook juggling a dozen breakfasts and a splattered apron. Waitresses in polyester.

Eliza sat next to her brother Jacob on the other side of the diner booth. Out the window, a group of elderly LDS in suits and dresses crossed the street carrying little suitcases, on their way to the temple, which loomed like a fortress on the hill overlooking the town. It filled the frame of the diner window.

“Why alone?” Eliza asked.

“I didn’t think we’d be meeting with the leader of your cult. I wanted to talk one woman to another.”

“No worries, my brother’s not going to tell me what to do or say. He knows how to stay quiet and listen.”

“That’s not much better. I know how these things work. I saw the
Dateline
show, I remember the FLDS coverage, and I’ve read Krakauer and other stuff about the polygamists. I’ve been reading up on the patriarchal system out here, I know what’s going on.”

“Come on, give me a little credit.” Eliza turned to her brother, who watched with a half-smile. “You could help me out here, you know.”

“What? Nah, you’re doing just fine on your own.” Jacob leaned back with a smile. “And I like hearing people talk about me like I’m not even here.”

The waitress appeared with Sprites for Eliza and Jacob and coffee for Allison. Eliza waited until she’d left before speaking again. “Don’t believe everything you see on TV. That
Dateline
story was a bunch of baloney. Those guys latched onto a couple of lurid details, and made up the rest of it. Or worse, they were listening to the Attorney General’s office, who were trying to cover their foul-up.”

“But he was on the inside during the whole thing,” she said.

“So? My brother’s a doctor who started working with the FBI because they wanted to get their agent out and needed someone on the inside.”

“And somehow became the leader of the whole cult,” Allison said. “Convenient.”

“Interim cult leader,” Jacob corrected. “Nobody else wanted the job. In fact, I’m on the lookout for a replacement, as soon as my wife agrees to get back to civilization. You want it? The job is yours.”

“Be serious,” Allison said.

“I am serious. Well, not about giving it to you, but I don’t want it. I’m not a leader, I’m just a guy in the wrong place at the wrong time. Their leader died and they have nowhere else to turn, except my father. He’d divide up their belongings and assign the single women to new husbands.”

Eliza allowed herself a smile. “He’s an enlightened cult leader. A kinder and gentler prophet.”

“What does that even mean?” Allison asked. “Never mind, I didn’t drive nine hundred miles because I’m curious about your church. And with all due respect to your brother, the so-called enlightened cult leader, it’s one of these self-proclaimed prophets who is killing my daughter.”

“Killing in what way?” Eliza asked. “You think he’s brainwashed her?”

“No, I mean he’s literally killing her. Well, that other thing, too. Madeline is like a zombie. Last time I saw her, she wouldn’t even look me in the eye. She mumbled something and handed me a letter. It’s like a letter from a POW camp, written under torture. How else could you explain all the awful things she said?”

Allison stopped, cleared her throat, took a sip of coffee, and Eliza could see she was fighting to keep from losing control. She waited until the woman seemed to recover, then said gently, “In what way is her life at risk, Allison?”

“They’re starving her to death.”

“What?”

Allison told them that her daughter had been a student at Oregon State University when she started emailing home about a Bible study group she was attending.

“I was happy at first. We didn’t go to church much after my husband was killed, and I always felt bad I didn’t give her more of a religious education. Madeline had been going through a tough time, struggling with depression and…other things. A supportive church community could be just what she needed. But then the letters started to get weird and she would quote scriptures and talk about Jesus all the time.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Maybe that’s normal with you people, but not with Madeline.”

“You people?” Jacob asked.

“Sorry, that came out wrong. What I mean is that Madeline was into Facebook and texting her friends about their favorite bands, or the latest episode of
Glee.
She wasn’t into the Bible and she didn’t talk about it all the time.”

“Maybe not,” Eliza said, “But people get caught up in things they’re studying. It could have just as easily been nineteenth century French poetry.”

“Sure, but she was using lots of
thee
s and
thou
s and tossing random scriptures into everything. We were Presbyterian, not Bible thumpers. And she started to talk about some group called the Chosen Ones. There were enough red flags that I got online and did a little searching. Took me ten seconds with Google before I was freaking out.”

“Back up a second. Who are these people?”

Allison explained. The Chosen Ones, it turned out, was a small cult that recruited on college campuses, in youth rehab centers, and even at rock concerts. California, Oregon, Nevada, Utah, Arizona. They would form study groups, pick out a few susceptible individuals and then move on, taking the new recruits with them, generally after writing a farewell letter to parents, indicating their desire to permanently severe ties. Nearest anyone could tell, they lived on the streets and in abandoned buildings, eating garbage and refusing any outside contact except with those they were trying to recruit. She believed they had a headquarters, but nobody had found it.

“So one day I get a letter in the mail. Madeline only lived an hour away and I don’t think she’d ever sent a snail mail in her life. I had a sick feeling when I opened it. There was some weird language about making this decision of her own free will and choice and that she was an adult and I shouldn’t look for her or try to contact her in any way. I took it to the police, but they wouldn’t do anything.”

“That’s what the weird language was about,” Jacob broke in. “So the police wouldn’t think she was kidnapped.”

“But obviously she
was
kidnapped. I don’t mean they tied her up screaming and shoved her in the trunk of the car, but there’s not much difference. She’s eating garbage and living on the street. Cut off from her family.”

“Any idea where to find her?” Eliza asked.

“She was in Portland for a while, recruiting, living on the street. But after I found her, they took her away. It could be that she’s in Seattle or L.A., but if they’re trying to isolate her, they’ve probably taken her to their headquarters.” Her voice caught and she was quiet for a moment, as if trying to regain control. “I’ve got to get her out of there. Three kids have already died in the past year. Two froze to death—they found their half-starved bodies wrapped in a thin blanket in an alley in Spokane. The third fell to her death from the bridge across the Hoover Dam. Either jumped or was pushed. Nobody saw it.”

“What did the police say?”

“They investigated. Death by exposure in the first case. Suicide in the second. That was it. Pretty pathetic.” She took a deep breath. “There’s more. Their leader is a man the others call the Disciple. Original name Caleb Kimball.”

Eliza’s mouth felt suddenly dry. “Caleb
Kimball
? He’s not…is that…?”

Jacob wore a grim expression. “Gideon and Taylor Junior have a younger brother named Caleb. I haven’t heard about him in years. If he’s going by the Disciple, that would be why.”

“Yes, he’s from a polygamist background. I don’t know anything more than that. That’s why I think you can help.”

Eliza didn’t know Caleb, but she knew his older brothers, Gideon and Taylor Junior. The two older brothers had been struggling over Eliza, as if she wanted anything to do with either of them. And she knew their father, manipulating both of them while he was making a play to take over the church. Taylor Junior had sexually assaulted her, and Gideon tried to force her into marriage in the temple, then kidnapped her into Witch’s Warts.

Eliza explained some of this to Allison Caliari, but not the uglier details of the ordeal, and certainly not the part where she’d crushed Gideon’s head with a stone to escape. She turned to her brother. “What’s he like?”

Jacob looked thoughtful. “A quiet kid, troubled. No doubt bullied by Gideon and Taylor Junior. All those younger kids were.”

Allison Caliari said, “I don’t know everything the Disciple believes, but I don’t think he’s teaching polygamy. His soapbox speeches are more like hard-core pentecostal tracts, but with a dose of crazy. He thinks the world is coming to an end—I’m fuzzy as to the details. These doomsday cults don’t keep blogs and send tweets. And I’m probably the biggest expert on this group, so if I don’t know, nobody does.”

“And what is it you want us to do, exactly?” Eliza asked.

Allison reached across the table and took her hand. “I need you to help me find my daughter before they find her dead in an alley somewhere. She’s not safe, none of them are. Please, for god’s sake, help me.”

Eliza was opening her mouth to ask what exactly Allison wanted her to do, but Jacob spoke first. “You mentioned a headquarters. Any idea where?”

Allison leaned back and the worried look eased, replaced by determination. “Again, nobody has seen it, but I think in Nevada. After I lost my daughter, I spent three weeks searching through Las Vegas, followed one group for a while, but they spotted me again and disappeared. They might be living in the desert. I overheard one of them talking about eating grasshoppers.”

Las Vegas.
Eliza thought of David and his comments about the religious sects in the area, and how the Lost Boys were involved in most of them.