Bitter Falls (Stillhouse Lake)(59)

It takes another hour to bust me loose into her custody, and once we’re outside and I’m breathing free air again, the shakes set in hard. I have to sit down on the closest bench. J. B. waits calmly next to me. “Hey,” she finally says. “You did good work, Gwen. It’s not your fault that you got taken by an expert. All indications are this Carol is one hell of a con artist.”

I swallow back my tide of anxiety. “Do you think there was any truth to the cult thing? That she’s on the run from them?”

“Do you?”

I don’t know why she’d fake that Bible, or wear the clothes she does, if it wasn’t on some level authentic. And how Carol, the brash con woman, seemed completely helpless at the sight of that circling RV. That’s conditioning. And terror. “Yeah, I do. It feels like she might have some thread of truth in all this. The story she told me was of a cult that operated some mobile preaching/recruitment mission out of RVs. You ever heard of anything like that? Maybe something run by a guy named Father Tom?”

“Doesn’t ring a bell, but I’ll ask around. Unfortunately, religious cults are always in style.” She slides me a sideways look. “You got anything else for me to go on?”

“Yeah.” I take a deep breath. “Got a pen?” She does. I reel off the five extra names Sam gave me last night.

“Okay, what am I looking for?”

“It might all be connected,” I tell her. J. B. looks up, frowning. “These young men also disappeared. I don’t think Remy’s the only one.”

“Lord Almighty, are you telling me that they’ve all joined this cult?”

“If they have, it might not have been under their own power,” I say. “And from what Carol said—if we can believe anything she said—they might not have survived.”

J. B. looks shaken. I feel it too. It’s like cracking open an egg and getting a flood of spiders. “I’ll look into it,” she says. “If it’s true, this may be bigger than we can handle.”

“Did you check into the nonprofit who hired us?”

“Yeah. It’s a religious group called All Saints International. It traces back to what is essentially a business park that runs an administrative service for small organizations, some of which look pretty shady to me. I don’t know they would have . . .”

Her voice fades away in my ears, because I feel a sudden snap of realization and a hot burn of anxiety. All Saints International. All those marked passages about saints. The quote in the front of the Bible. Carol saying that Remy’s with the saints.

That cannot be a coincidence. But why the hell would they hire us to investigate Remy if they’d actually taken him?

Because they know we’re not going to find him. They want to find Carol. Holy shit. We’ve been played. Carol knew someone would come looking. It wasn’t a coincidence that they’d found her at the bus station; I’d found her for them. She ran because she knew that.

Carol knows things they can’t afford to have revealed.

“Gwen?” J. B. asks, and I snap back to focus on her again. I explain my theory, and I see the grimness set into her expression when she thinks it through. “Those bastards. They used us.”

“I can’t look for Carol anymore,” I tell her. “But maybe someone else can. I can keep them focused on me. You can locate Carol and get her to safety.”

“How? She’s not about to trust me any more than you. Or anyone, as far as I can tell.”

J. B. has a point. And I don’t have an answer. It’s frustrating, and I desperately want to find out what happened to Remy, but I need to back away from Carol. At least for now.

I sigh. “Just try, okay? By the way, sorry about the bail. I appreciate it.”

“This? This is nothing. I’ve had to rescue my people from way worse situations than this. But stay out of trouble for a while, okay? This case will go away; a news cycle of coverage is all the DA’s going to need, and then he’ll quietly dismiss. I’ll dig into All Saints International a little deeper, particularly the corporate officers. Might be something there. I’ll follow up on these other cases too. But you need to get home.”

“My rental car’s still at the hotel.”

“I’ll drive you back to Stillhouse Lake, and have one of my local guys take the rental back. Deal?”

The idea of going home to my family sounds like heaven. “Deal,” I agree. “Thank you.”

Once we’re at J. B.’s spacious sedan, she stops and opens the trunk. There’s a solid lockbox inside, and she takes it out and hands it to me, along with a set of small keys. “It’s a loaner,” she says. “Since they’re not releasing your gun back to you until the case is dismissed, and I don’t want you running around without anything. Lose it and you’re dead to me.”

She’s not kidding, and I nod. I get into the passenger seat and open the lockbox. Inside is a pretty fine Browning 9 mm, and ammunition to go with it. There’s even a belt clip holster. I prefer a shoulder holster, but I’m grateful for anything. I put it on my right side, and the weight makes tension unspool inside me.

Really need to work on that, I think. I want guns to be tools of my job, not security blankets. But with my history that’s a long, tough therapeutic road.