Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation by A.W. Hill Read Free Book Online

suppose. Katy
confessed—not to me, but to another girl from the congregation—and then it all
came out. An assembly of the elders was convened to weigh on Katy’s disfellowship.
There is no harsher sanction. Disfellowship is living damnation. I recused
myself so that I could stand witness for my daughter, because I couldn’t accept
that the little girl I’d raised was beyond redemption. The Overseers granted me
a year to restore her to the fold. On her eighteenth birthday, Katy was taken
again into the hall. For a year, we were like . . . like Lazarus and Martha. My
Katy returned! And then, and then . . . ”
         “She
backslid,” Raszer surmised. “The two boys, the ones you say assaulted Katy at
the rave . . . were they prosecuted for their part in the Kingdom Hall
vandalism?”
         “To my
everlasting regret,” Endicott replied. “No. The elders thought it best to
handle them through the families, through our own church law. Had we left it to
the police, they might have been in a prison cell on that awful night.”
         “About
that night,” Raszer said, “the night of Katy’s abduction. You said that Ruthie
and the boys had gotten Katy into drugs. The whole picture: the Lincoln
Continental, the business suits, the style of execution . . . is there any
evidence to suggest a drug deal gone bad? That Katy was taken as some kind of .
. . payment?”
         “If she
was, and she is paying off their debt, I’m afraid she’s already damned.”
         “Not if
she’s been taken beyond the range of her free will, Mr. Endicott. We like to
think our souls are sovereign, but I’ve seen strong people lose themselves in
the presence of power, and a girl like Katy, raised not to question authority—”
         Raszer
stopped midsentence. Something was wrong.
         Endicott
turned from the rail and stumbled forward, coughing up a throatful of mucus and
bile. Raszer offered an arm, but the man charged past, staggering down the
steps into the midst of the statuary. He stopped in front of the goddess
Cybele.
         “Mr.
Endicott?” Raszer called out. “Silas?” He descended into the garden. The black
sky suddenly dropped a payload of nickel-size hailstones; they ricocheted like
bullets off the stone. Endicott stretched his fingers toward the goddess, then
withdrew. With her right hand, she offered a carved pomegranate,
indistinguishable in size and shape from an apple. In her cupped left palm,
Brigit had placed a little black “moon rock” Raszer had once bought for her at
the Griffith Observatory. It was the rock that held Endicott’s stare. He spun
around, his index finger raised, then fell like a tree, knocking Raszer off his
feet and pinning him to the wet ground.
         After a
moment, Raszer gingerly rolled Silas Endicott onto his back. There was no
reflex, only the wheezing exhalation of foul breath as his lungs emptied. No
pulse, either. To all appearances, the old man had dropped stone dead.
        

THREE
        
         BRIGIT HADN’T SCREAMED, but the sight of a corpse
in her father’s garden, especially one as formidable in death as Silas
Endicott’s, had to have marked her. Raszer watched for signs of delayed effect.
As he drove her to LAX the following morning to be returned to her mother’s
house, to school, to her “normal life in Connecticut, he decided to face the
matter head-on.
         “I can
still remember seeing my first dead person,” he said. “How weird it was. It was
my grandpa, my mother’s dad. One minute he was there, alive, beside me and
somehow inside me, too. The next
minute he was gone, and there was an emptiness in me. That part of me that was
him had died.”
         “Yeah,
but it wasn’t like that with Mr. Endicott,” she said.
         “How do
you mean, honey?”
         “It was
like he was already gone.”
         “I think
I know what you mean,” said Raszer. “He was—”
         “No,”
she