Promise Not To Tell(22)

“No kidding.”

“That’s the time that Zane torched the compound.”

“Sure is. Damn. You think there might be a connection?”

“Call me insightful.”

“My nighttime habits ruined a lot of my relationships,” Cabot said.

“I know what you mean. I’ve given up on what people like to call relationships. I’m what you might call a serial dater now. Haven’t even done any of that for a while.”

“Commitment issues?”

“Oh, yeah. Also abandonment issues and anxiety attacks,” she said. “All in all I’m not good relationship material.”

“Sounds like we have a few things in common.”

“You’re still dressed,” she said. “Didn’t you even go to bed tonight?”

“Yes, but now I’m up and thinking about the investigation. I’ve got a question for you. Want to talk for a while?”

“Now?”

“Not like either of us is getting any sleep,” he pointed out.

“True.” She hesitated, glanced past him into the small space and then, on impulse, stood back and pulled the door wider. “We might as well use my room. It’s bigger than yours. I’ve got two chairs.”

They sat down in front of the window, the little round table between them. Neither of them made a move to turn on the light. It was as if they had both independently reached the conclusion that it might be more comfortable to talk in the dark.

“What is your question?” she asked.

Cabot leaned forward and rested his forearms on his knees, his fingers lightly clasped. “We know that Zane started his operation in the Seattle area.”

“At the house outside of Wallerton. I remember that horrible old place.”

“So do I. But he kept us there for only a couple of months before he moved all of us to the California compound.”

Virginia shuddered. “Fortunately for you and me, that turned out to be the town where Anson Salinas was the chief of police. Otherwise we both would have died in that barn fire.”

“Yes, but my point is, Zane recruited most of his followers from the Pacific Northwest.”

Virginia contemplated that briefly. “I’ve never really thought about Zane’s past. He was always just the demon from my childhood. A cold-blooded killer. Do you think he was from the Seattle area originally?”

“We can’t be absolutely sure,” Cabot said. “We never managed to identify any of Zane’s family. For all intents and purposes he was a true orphan. He did a very thorough job of erasing his past. But he was familiar enough with the Northwest to choose the Wallerton house, an isolated place, for the first compound. In my experience, the bad guys like to operate on familiar territory whenever possible.”

Virginia studied Cabot’s shadowed profile. There was a dark intensity about him again, the same intensity she had witnessed that afternoon when he had worked through the logic of how Hannah Brewster had died. She could have sworn that some eerie, dangerous energy shivered in the atmosphere around him.

“Why would he move the cult to California if he felt more comfortable here in the Pacific Northwest?” she asked.

“Could be any number of reasons, but the most logical one is that there were people here who knew him. He was trying to reinvent himself as a cult leader. He preferred a location where no one would be likely to recognize him.”

“So you and your brothers and Anson have concluded that there is a very good chance he was from this region,” Virginia said. “That makes sense. He was still a young man when he fired up his cult.”

“We’ve never even been sure of his age, but according to the fake ID he was using in those days, he was probably twenty-four or twenty-five when he started recruiting.”

Virginia thought about that. “He must have started out with very little cash. How did he manage to acquire the Wallerton house?”

“We tracked that down easily enough through the property tax records. It belonged to one of his followers, a man named Robert Fenwick. Shortly after he gave Zane the deed, Fenwick died in a car crash.”

“Convenient.”

“Zane didn’t need him anymore.”

“No.”

The room seemed to have gotten colder. Virginia wrapped her arms around herself to ward off the chill.

“Zane was a manipulative sociopath,” she said. “That kind of evil shows up at a very young age, so it’s safe to say he must have made some enemies before he turned twenty-four or twenty-five.”

“Zane was a sociopath but he was not crazy, not in the sense that he believed himself to be a real prophet or supernatural leader. He wasn’t delusional. He was in the cult business for the money and the sense of power he got when he manipulated people like our mothers.”

Virginia thought about that. “You said he was in it for the money.”

“His operation didn’t last long – about eighteen months. But during that time he raked in a lot of cash or, rather, his followers raked in the money for him. Many of them turned over their life savings. As far as we can tell, he didn’t take any followers who were not useful to him.”

“I’ve always wondered why he recruited my mother. She was a young woman on her own with a child. I know she didn’t have any money to give to Zane.”