Chapter 12 Trust #2
I wrinkled my nose. I had little use for organized religion, and prosperity gospel, in particular, rubbed me the wrong way. But it looked like the people whose cars were in the parking lot could afford to lay down some cash for Christ, and who was I to say what they should do with their money?
But I sure as hell was gonna judge them for how they treated their young women—especially if one of them was in trouble.
Detwiler pulled in after me. We nodded at each other, and approached the church.
We crossed the parking lot to open the heavy front door, and were immediately hit with a wall of frosty air-conditioning.
We walked down a hallway that reminded me more of a school than of a church, then turned right where a sign listed today’s worship times.
The door to an auditorium was propped open.
A scream sounded.
Detwiler and I swept into the auditorium, calling for backup.
The auditorium was dark like a movie theater.
There were a dozen people up front, circling a stage lit by nothing more than a ring of guttering candles.
In the center of the ring was a girl on her knees before a large washtub.
Her face was buried in her hands. Her head and shoulders were soaking wet.
Quentin Sims stood before her, shaking a Bible.
“Repent of this evil!” he bellowed at her. “I cast out the devil in you!”
He grabbed her neck and plunged her head into the tub. The girl struggled against him, her fingers clawing at the tub’s edge. They were trying to drown her.
“Police! Let her go!” Detwiler and I shouted in unison.
Sims turned toward us, his face twisted in wrath at the interruption. But he didn’t let her go.
Detwiler and I stormed the stage, scattering candles and shoving aside people in the circle. Detwiler grabbed Sims and dragged him off the girl. I pulled the girl from the water. She was gasping, her hair stuck to her cheek.
“Breathe.” I pushed her hair back. I recognized her as Rebecca, one of Leah’s friends from Sims’s house. “Deep breaths.”
Her face crumpled, and she sobbed against my shoulder.
Detwiler had Sims down on the stage, his arm behind his back. The surrounding people, who I assumed were parishioners, had begun to back away, turning toward the exit.
“No, you don’t!” I shouted. “Everyone freeze.”
The exit was darkened by deputies sweeping in, Monica’s horrified face among them.
I looked down at the girl. “What happened?”
She couldn’t be more than fourteen. She was capable only of sobbing.
A man elbowed forward, one I’d seen in the surrounding circle, not intervening. “That’s my daughter. She’s fine.”
I turned on him. “She’s not fine. What’s the matter with you?”
“She needs to submit to authority—”
“The only one who’s going to be submitting to authority around here is you,” I snarled, rising from the girl. “Sit down and put your hands behind your back.”
Soft laughter hissed behind me. I wheeled to see Quentin Sims chortling under Deputy Detwiler’s knee in his spine.
“What’s so funny?” I demanded.
His glasses had slipped down his nose. He said it loudly, loudly enough for his followers to hear and murmur in agreement: “It’s just a baptism. You’ve interrupted a baptism.”
“It sure looked like child abuse to me,” I growled at him.
Sims smiled at me beatifically. “The Lord’s work is invisible to the evil of the world.”
I wanted to throat-punch him.
Instead, I called EMS and CPS. EMS determined that the girl’s vitals were stable, and swept her away to the hospital.
Detwiler and I began questioning the participants, who were all members of the congregation.
To a man (and I noticed that they were all men), they said that Rebecca was being rebaptized with holy water to cleanse her soul after some disobedience.
When the nature of the disobedience was exposed, it turned out that the offense was the high crime of sneaking out to go swimming when the air-conditioning at her house went out.
My colleague Kara, from CPS, called from the hospital as I was pacing the parking lot. “She’s not talking. She’s too afraid.”
“You can’t bring her back to her parents,” I said.
“I know. I can stall for maybe seventy-two hours. But I’m going to need something more after that, or she’s going to have to be returned to her parents.”
My grip on the phone was white. “I’ll get back to you.”
I turned to the doors as the parishioners were walking out. Not in handcuffs.
I wheeled to Monica. “I’m going to charge them with attempted murder—”
“I know. I know.” Her jaw had hardened. “I read them their rights. But then I got told to stand down.”
“By who—?”
I followed her gaze as it landed over my shoulder.
At the end of the parking lot sat the sheriff in an unmarked car. He was smoking a cigarette, watching the cars leave.
I took two steps toward the unmarked car, but Monica caught my elbow.
“Don’t. I already tried.”
“But that girl—”
“We gotta find some other way to help her.” Her expression smoldered in wrath. “Nobody who does that to little girls gets to walk free in Bayern County.”
The sheriff beckoned to me with the lit end of his cigarette.
I stalked toward his car.
“Sheriff, those people—”
He made a slicing motion with the ember in his hand. “Don’t you go bothering these people anymore, Koray.”
“They were trying to drown that girl!”
“That was a baptism.”
I peeled my lips back into a smile. “Shall I tell Child Protective Services to let her go?” I knew full well that the sheriff had no jurisdiction over CPS.
“Koray, one more word from you, and I’ll have you demoted to the secretarial pool.”
He started his engine and pulled away, smiling as I fumed.
I exhaled and walked back to the church. Above the open doors that had just belched out their contents of human trash, I glimpsed something I hadn’t before: a cross formed with two railroad spikes tied together, perched above the doors.
My eyes narrowed. That was too much of a coincidence.
Witchcraft for me, but not for thee?
—
I’d been told to leave this investigation alone.
I sure as fuck wasn’t going to. But if I didn’t have the support of my chain of command, I was screwed.
I didn’t have any designs to be promoted to a public role, like chief of the Detective Bureau or elected sheriff, one day, but I wanted to continue to work.
And the sheriff could make that very hard for me.
I went back to the office, to the Dispatch pool, to listen to the recording of the anonymous call. I couldn’t use it as evidence of anything, but I wanted to know if I recognized the voice.
The voice was female, whispering: “Hi. I’m, um…calling to report a girl in trouble.”
“What’s the address?”
The female whispered the address of the Greenwood Kingdom Church. “There’s screaming. Please send someone.”
“Do you know who—”
Before the dispatcher could get more information, the line went dead.
I frowned. I listened to the recording three times. I couldn’t be one hundred percent certain, but the voice sounded a lot like Leah’s.
When I returned to the Detective Bureau to file my report—which I intended to do in excruciatingly correct detail, minus my suspicions that Leah had dropped a dime on her father—Chief was leaning in the doorway of his office.
He must’ve heard about my confrontation with the sheriff.
He gestured for me to follow him into his office.
I did so, and Chief closed the door.
“Chief, I—” I began.
“Don’t you dare apologize for stepping on the toes of some privileged rich fuckers.” Chief’s eyes narrowed, and he looked pissed. “You don’t worry about the sheriff. I’m your commanding officer, and I tell you what to do.”
“Yes, Chief.”
He paced up and down the length of his office floor. “You run that investigation how you see fit—the current investigations and the cold case.”
I told him what I’d found so far, which felt like precious little.
“You keep on asking questions.” He finally settled in his chair behind his desk. “I have my own biases about this case, and I’m not going to burden you with them. You just go wherever the evidence leads. Understood?”
“Understood.”
He nodded sharply, and I took that to mean I was dismissed.
I turned to leave, and heard him call out after me. “Koray.”
He wrote something down on a Post-it note. “Judge Jorene Chamberlain is on vacation, but this is her personal cell number. If you need warrants, feel free to contact her.”
I thanked Chief and took the note. Judge Chamberlain was narrowly elected last November. She was most decidedly not part of the old boys’ club, and I admired her for the way she spoke out in the press about police violence in the national news. I’d never asked her for a warrant before.
“Chief, you think the Kings of Warsaw Creek are involved in some kind of criminal conspiracy?”
“My opinions on this don’t matter.” He leaned forward, with his elbows on the desk, and steepled his fingers. “But I will say the old boys’ club has run this county for far too long.”
I sucked in my breath, thoughts whirling. “If I’m out of line, I’m sure you’ll say so, but it sounds like you might be wanting to run for sheriff next year.”
Chief smiled under his moustache. “And go to war with Sheriff Wilson? I’d do no such thing.”
Nobody sane would. Sheriffs here handpicked their successors from the chiefs of the Detective Bureau, Patrol, and Jail Administration.
The favorite was known well in advance, as he would shadow the sheriff for a time, and the sheriff would retire quietly.
That was the way it had worked as long as I’d been here.
“You would,” I said brazenly.
He grinned and sat back in his chair. He put his finger to his lips like he was Santa. “Go work your case, Koray.”
I left then, my head spinning. Was Chief planning a coup, or an all-out war? Or was he waiting for the torch to be passed gracefully? When the sheriff was out for his cancer treatments, Chief stood in for him, so he was the presumptive favorite.
I really couldn’t ask him. And I was damn well gonna keep my lips zipped.
Chief was playing three-dimensional chess when I existed only on a two-dimensional plane.
Chief had been splashed all over the national news in the Forest Strangler investigation.
He was the man whose detectives put an FBI agent behind bars.
That was “fuck you” credibility in any arena.
I would continue my investigation…quietly. I pocketed the note with the judge’s phone number on it.
I didn’t like the idea of the sheriff gunning for me if I made things difficult for the Kings of Warsaw Creek, but at least Chief had my back. I wouldn’t put him in the line of fire unless I had to.
Loyalties being what they were and all. It was damn sure a good thing to have some of my own, people I could trust.