Ilka hadn’t fallen asleep until late that night. Her thoughts had grown darker as the hours passed, until finally she was sure there was no way out for Lydia, plus Artie would end up disabled and never forgive her. When she woke up the next morning, she felt woozy. She gazed around the room. Her mother and Jette were gone, their bed neatly made.
Her lanky body ached as she slowly crawled out of bed. It was nine thirty. Her mother had left a note in the bathroom, informing her that they’d left for the funeral home and that the hotel served breakfast until ten.
Only a few guests were still sitting in the breakfast section of the hotel’s foyer. Starbucks coffee stood on a counter, with cornflakes, milk, and a toaster for the white bread. She poured herself a cup of coffee and toasted a slice of bread. She turned to look for a table, and there he was, standing with a cup in his hand, eyeing her. The man from Texas.
Ilka whirled around to drop everything and run, but she caught herself. Maybe she was safer here than anywhere else. She took a moment to gather herself, then she walked over to sit at a table close to the hotel’s reception desk.
“I don’t know where she is,” she said, when the man approached her.
“May I have a seat?” He nodded at the chair across from her.
“I’d rather you didn’t. I know you’re looking for Lydia Rogers, but you’re too late. Your friends have already found her.”
He studied her for a moment, then he shook his head and pulled the chair out to sit down. “You’re wrong, the Rodriguez brothers are no friends of mine. I’m guessing that’s who you’re talking about.”
Ilka nodded.
He held his hand out to her. “My name is Calvin Jennings. I’m here to help Miss Rogers.”
She shook his hand reluctantly. Something about his face reminded her of an actor. Ed Harris. Maybe it was his eyes, his high forehead.
“I’m a Texas policeman. I took part in the investigation, back when Lydia’s brother was killed. I never pegged her as the Baby-Butcher.”
Ilka hadn’t touched her toast, and now a young woman was clearing the tables.
“We already knew back then that the Rodriguez brothers headed up a drug cartel—in fact, we were zeroing in on them when Lydia’s brother showed up. He wanted to go into the Witness Protection Program in exchange for telling us everything he knew. He had records of every delivery he’d been a part of.”
Ilka was starting to believe this man. She sipped her coffee and listened.
“Then Ben Rogers was killed, and in no time flat all the evidence was pointing to his sister. It was my job to dig around in her past, and I found out she’d been a member of a religious cult—God’s Will, they call themselves. A man named Isiah Burnes has been leading it for forty-two years. It started in Utah then expanded to a little town in West Texas, where Lydia and her brother happened to live. The members of the cult are completely shut off from the outside world, but because they’re Christian, and their financial situation is solid, they have the support of the locals. Unfortunately, that includes the police and local authorities. Right off the bat I knew this story about Lydia Rogers being behind these brutal crimes—the mutilated corpses of babies—came from the Rodriguez family. They happen to have close ties with God’s Will. Lydia left the cult, which they don’t allow, and up pops this chance for them to punish her. And they took it.”
Ilka caught herself staring at him, holding her coffee cup way too high in the air.
“But we searched for her anyway, put out an APB, went to the press,” he said, disgusted by the memory. “It ended up being a regular manhunt. We found evidence that the Rodriguez family planted two baby corpses in her backyard to tie her to the case, which made me even more interested in her.”
“But if the police knew it wasn’t her, why didn’t they stop searching for her? The last twelve years she’s been living underground with a death sentence hanging over her. How could all of you let this happen?”
“She did shoot three men. And back then it was a big relief for everybody when we identified a guilty party that very afternoon. People were terrified; it was all anybody talked about, these little corpses of babies. We needed somebody we could point to. Lydia got caught between her brother and the Rodriguez family, and we had strong evidence against her.”
“But still!”
He hesitated for a moment. “I talked to her the day she fled from Texas.”
“You were the one she called, to report that her family had been killed?”
Jennings nodded.
“You let her get away.”
He nodded again. “We’d just heard that Enrique Rodriguez was among those killed, and that his brother Javi had been in the house. She’d never have had a fair chance in Texas. And I felt bad about not getting there in time to help her brother—I felt guilty as hell about that. He and his family were wiped out, right after he’d come to us asking for help. We didn’t take it serious enough.”
He looked away for a moment. “I just wanted to get her out of there. That way I figured there was a chance we could still bring the guilty ones to justice, the Rodriguez family. She’d been in the house, she was a main witness, but I needed time to gather evidence and make the case. And that wasn’t going to happen if Lydia was in custody. Then I found out about the cult, and I realized they’re the ones who wanted to pin this on her. It made me even happier she’d managed to get away.”
“But you knew it wasn’t her! Surely you could have put her someplace safe and helped her?”
“We had a different sheriff back then. It was more important to him that we had a guilty party than the guilty party. And for years he benefited from the protection the cult gave him.”
“Protection?”
“The cult has a peace force they call the God Squad. Isiah Burnes’s private army, is what it boils down to. They keep folks in line, and they deal with the people who either get thrown out or leave the cult. Lydia and her brother were born into God’s Will, and children of parents who have devoted their lives to the cult automatically belong to the cult. They become the cult’s children, you could say. I don’t know how much you know about these things.”
Ilka shook her head. “Nothing.” Of course she’d heard stories of Jehovah’s Witnesses, members who were expelled or chose to leave, but she didn’t think they actually had their own militia, with the power that Jennings described.
He folded his arms on the table and leaned forward. “There’s been serious accusations leveled against Burnes. Polygamy, sexual intercourse with minors, abuse. It’s a religious cult with its own rules and laws. According to God’s Will, a man has to have at least three wives to pass through the gates of heaven. But it’s common for the older men to have a lot more than that. Girls born into the cult are given a number at birth. They don’t have a name until the day they turn twelve, when they get baptized and declared ready for marriage. Nobody’s interested in the boys, though. When they grow up, they’re competition to the older men, who aren’t about to share their girls and women. When a male baby is weak, they throw him away. I’m talking literally here. They take him out in a meadow and leave him. I’ve heard some mighty gruesome stories about women who don’t get to nurse or take care of their baby boys; the children grow up with no physical contact with their mothers. The ones who survive are sent out to work when they turn five or six. And a lot of them get thrown out and have to fend for themselves the day they turn fifteen.”
“Where do they go?” Ilka said.
“They drive them out of state and just dump them somewhere, and they don’t know anybody, they don’t have any money. Boys who’ve never lived outside the cult. A lot of them kill themselves or become criminals, it’s just so hard for them to make their way in life.”
Jennings folded his hands, a funny look in his eyes. “Lydia’s brother was one of the boys who were thrown out.”
“But Lydia stayed.” Ilka pushed her cup aside. The coffee was cold.
He nodded. “She stayed, yes. Until her brother managed to get her out. There’s a kind of underground railroad that helps women and children escape from the cult. A woman by the name of Alice Payne runs it. She’s the one who helped Lydia and her brother back then, and now Lydia helps her. Lydia managed to live in freedom for four years, until her brother and his family were murdered.”
“Why did she stay after he was thrown out, back when he was young?”
“Like I said, the cult doesn’t let people walk out.” He stared into space for a moment. “But you have to remember, it’s the only life these people know. I’ve talked to several women who escaped, and almost every one of them said they felt bound to Isiah Burnes, despite the incest and abuse. It’s impossible for us on the outside to understand.”
“They’re brainwashed.”
He nodded. “And the God Squad keeps an eye on everybody. Burnes calls it a peace force, but it’s nothing more than a bunch of goons, a gang, and they’ll kill without batting an eye. And not only the people in the cult. They come down hard on anybody who sets up against them. Against the family. The brotherhood. Prisons can be many things. The God Squad are executioners, but the most terrifying part of it all is that most of the members stay loyal to their guru. I talked to one woman who believes that all the good Burnes has done outweighs the misery he’s caused. Misery to the children of the cult, is what she meant.”
Ilka squirmed in her chair. This was beyond anything she’d ever imagined. “Where does the money come from to keep the cult going?”
“The leaders make sure new cult members give up everything they own. They put on revivals, free-spirit seminars. And once they get their claws into people, the new members give it all up gladly.”
The more Ilka asked questions, the more she got answers she really didn’t want to hear.
“Another cult leader was arrested in Utah not so long ago. He has sixty wives and they say he’s fathered several hundred children. He’s been charged with murder, kidnapping, rape, and statutory rape. The police in Texas will drop the charges against Lydia if she’ll come in and testify against Isiah Burnes. It’s estimated that God’s Will has between four and five thousand members, but it could be more, lots more.”
“I don’t know where she is,” Ilka said. “I’m afraid the Rodriguez brothers found her.”
Jennings raised his eyebrows. “What makes you think that?”
Ilka told him about Lydia hiding in Artie’s house. “But when I got there, all I found was her empty bag. They had taken the money and her brother’s records.”
He nodded. “The money. There was a rumor going around that she got away with quite a bit of the drug money.”
“It was a mistake. She didn’t know what was in the bag when they threw it in the car, and the records were hidden in her nephew’s baby carrier. She didn’t find them until later on, after she’d gotten away. And she couldn’t go back and return them, could she.”
“The nephew.” He leaned forward. “We never found Ben’s son. The Rodriguez boys claimed that Lydia killed him and used his corpse to smuggle drugs.”
Ilka shook her head. “Ethan’s alive.” She told him how Lydia had rescued the boy and the nanny from her brother’s house and taken them with her.
Jennings looked surprised. “Are you sure about this?”
Ilka nodded. “I met him,” she said, but didn’t tell him where. “How could you let her take the blame? Why didn’t you do anything to help her?”
“I am doing something, I’m here now. And the last time I saw you, you weren’t much for helping me find her.”
“I didn’t know you were asking about Lydia. And now she’s gone.”
He glanced out the window, and for a moment he gazed out at the tall masts of the yachts in the harbor. His eyes sank deeper into his face as he frowned. “I don’t think the Rodriguez boys took her,” he finally said, in a slow drawl. “They’re not interested in the reward. They just want their money back, without drawing any attention to the old case. Javi Rodriguez got off easy, twelve years in the pen, and the only reason they didn’t try to get him out before he finished his sentence was all the money he was making inside. The prison drug business was too good. Besides, back then they had this verbal agreement with the sheriff: He gave them free rein and they did the same with him. It’s not like that nowadays.”
“But still, I don’t know where she is,” Ilka said. She wasn’t sure if she should be relieved or not.
“If anyone’s got Lydia, I’m thinking it’s the God Squad, and that’s not good. It might mean they’ve tracked down the underground railroad.”
“And?”
“And that means we might never see her again. Promise me you’ll contact me the second you get any sign she’s alive.”
He pulled a card out of his pocket and gave it to Ilka. It was the same one he’d left in the doorway of Lydia’s apartment. “We need to find her; it’s important.”
She watched as he left, then kept staring after he was gone. Now she understood; Lydia knew it wasn’t only the Rodriguez brothers looking for her. Ilka had seen the fear in her eyes. All this time she’d known she had more to lose than the bag, more to be afraid of than ending up on death row.
She tossed her crumpled-up napkin aside. Her fingers hurt from squeezing it.