Chapter 29
29
“Eighty-four young women.” That was all Emerson said as Gunn pulled out onto Boethe Street. “I can’t imagine the fear and pain that eighty-four families went through. I have been the minister in Evalyn for ten years. I didn’t know. For seven years. How many young women sitting in my own church were victims? I still can’t get over that. How many did I not help that I could have?”
“I know.” Gunn didn’t think anyone he had served in his own congregation had been involved with James David Rei but it was possible. He just didn’t know. “I’m going to go back over my records. See if anyone… stands out.”
Because four more women were missing and Cam had made it clear that there could be up to twenty more. They were still searching out a list or a collection of journals. Rei’s manifesto. Thirteen witnesses interviewed by Cam’s FBI branch had reported that James David Rei and his team of elders had kept everything they had ever done written in a set of journals. Blue journals that contained the truth of everything that man had done.
Rei had been said to live by those words, those instructions he had claimed came to him directly from God.
The very idea of someone using the God that Gunn served as a weapon against the weak and defenseless sickened him completely.
To have claimed to have been anointed by God was an insult to the very Scriptures Gunn studied. Hebrews 5:4 said it: Andno one takes the honor for himself, but receives it when he is called by God, just as Aaron also was. No man can just call himself God’s Chosen One. Nor bare false prophecies, to speak a word in God’s name God had not commanded.
There was a lot Gunn would say to a man like James David Rei. That man had had no spiritual right to ever call himself Reverend or Father.
“I’ll help. Then… I’ll do the same. I have to do something. Knowing eighty-four. Maybe more. Just… taken. Vulnerable, defenseless, and just… taken. I keep seeing your Ayla in my head, Gunn. And your sisters and Hala. And Leina, and… I pulled her nieces out of that fire. I carried those two little girls out of a burning building, terrified for their baby brother. He was three months old then. I still wake in the middle of the night, searching for that baby. Sure he is burning in that hell. Rei had him and that baby was nearly shot and killed. How can I forget that?”
Gunn couldn’t do anything more than listen.
How could he possibly help Emerson get through this pain?