PERRY HAD BEEN face-to-face with one of the most famous people to walk the earth, and the significance wasn’t wasted on him.
The shock of the find fired through the gathered group like multiple lightning strikes. The light banter had evaporated under the heat of witnessing the impossible. The men stood huddled around the coffin, the group immersed in silence, each man lost in the forest of his own thoughts. Only Dr. Curtis was distant. He remained seated on the grass, staring across the distance like a blind man might stare into his darkness.
The site had taken on a surrealistic feel: Yellow light rained down from the work lights high on their aluminum stands, the sound of the backhoe’s diesel engine idling nearby, the oak-scented breeze wafting through, and the lifeless remains of one of history’s best known people lying in a fragile box.
“I hate to be the stupid one of the group,” Brent said, his voice a single level above a whisper, “but I need to ask. Exactly who is Mary Magdalene? She’s mentioned in the Bible, right?”
“Yes,” Perry said. “Mary Magdalene is a key personality in the ministry of Jesus. Everything about her is unique, and she has been the source of inspiration for many; she’s also been the subject of the wildest speculation.”
“Such as?” Brent prompted.
“Such as Jesus didn’t die on the cross but lived to an old age with Mary as His wife, such as she is the author of the Gospel of John, such as she presented a threat to the pride and position of the disciples, and other nonsense.”
“If she was none of that, then what was she?” Brent asked.
“Her name is Mary, which is the Greek form of the Hebrew Miriam. The Bible refers to her as Mary Magdalene. Most likely the Magdalene refers to a town in Galilee called Magdala. The first time she’s mentioned in the Bible two things are noted: One, she was possessed of evil spirits which Jesus cast out of her; two, she provided support for Jesus’ ministry from . . . I think the passage says personal means.”
“Private means,” Curtis said. “She and the other women supported Jesus and the disciples through their private financial resources.”
“Thanks, Doc,” Perry said, glad that Curtis was still with them in mind as well as body. “Jesus was an itinerant preacher going from town to town with His message. Some of the monetary support for the ministry came from people like Mary.”
“Wait a minute,” Brent interrupted. “Evil spirits? Demons? That was just a convenient way for the ancients to describe illness they couldn’t explain . . . right?”
“No,” Perry explained. “The Bible uses other words for diseases. It distinguishes between demonic activity and human disease.”
“So you really believe that Mary was inhabited by non-human, intelligent forces?” He laughed and looked for support from the others. No one else was laughing. He shuffled his feet then said, “Sorry. You were saying . . .”
“Mary and other women traveled with Jesus and the disciples. They heard what the men heard, saw much of what they saw. They were there from the early days of Jesus’ ministry, and they were there when Jesus was nailed to the cross. In fact, Mary watched Him die.
“The following Sunday morning, she went to the tomb and found it open. The sight crushed her already injured heart. As she wept, an angel told her that Jesus had risen from the dead and that she should go tell the disciples, which she did. Later she came back to the tomb and Jesus—back from the dead—appeared to her. As would be expected, she was overcome with emotion and began clinging to His feet. He had to tell her to let go. Her place in history is unique because she is the first person to see Jesus after his resurrection.”
“What’s she doing here?” Brent asked. “California is a long way from the biblical lands.”
Perry looked down at the body, amazed and humbled at what he was seeing. “I don’t know, Brent. I’m as surprised as you.”
“Man, you weren’t kidding when you said this project would change everything,” Brent said.
“We have to treat this differently,” Curtis said. Perry looked over his shoulder and saw the scientist rising from his place on the ground and walking toward him. “I can’t send this to just anybody. I want to handle it myself.”
“I was hoping you’d say that,” Perry said. “I’ll have it moved out of the way and let you examine it . . . er, her . . . for as long as you like. In the meantime, we have some more digging to do.” Perry’s words were strange and even, the words of a natural leader with a mission to complete. On the outside he was rock solid; on the inside he felt like Jell-O.
AFTER LEAVING O’TOOL’S, Anne had driven around town for an hour. Perry’s words reverberated in her mind and heart.
“You owe God an apology.”
At first the comment galled her, eating at her insides as if she had downed acid. Anger had raged in her like waves in a stormy sea crashing against the hull of her fragile emotions. But there was another emotion flowing in her, and unlike her anger and bitterness, this emotion was cool and promised a refreshing release.
It’s a trick of the imagination, she told herself. She was tired, upset, hurt, angry, and in need of emotional freedom, but there was no freedom. Sorrow and hatred were two coals that refused to go out, two embers that burned hotter with the passage of time, and they burned right in the center of Anne’s heart.
She drove up and down the streets of Tejon, her adopted town, and tried to regain her fury. She wanted to stay mad, wanted to feel the blaze of anger in her. It made her feel alive and, ironically, in control. When she was angry, she was not heartbroken. It was an odd, illogical fact, but one she had learned to live with. Anger drove away other emotions, those emotions that hurt too much to ignore.
The anger wouldn’t hold this evening. Perry’s words about owing God an apology were pervasive, wheedling out of her thoughts she didn’t want to have.
Once she considered herself a friend of God, His child, His servant, but after her husband’s brutal murder, she could no longer see herself that way. She had tried going back to church, but it seemed a hollow gesture. People looked at her through eyes of pity; some even avoided her, perhaps to avoid having to face the fact that bad things happen to good people. The pastor had been kind and supportive, but there were no words in his vocabulary, no techniques in his training that could sponge away the black veil of sorrow from her mind.
Her faith collapsed like stacked dominoes clattering around her feet. Her family had rocks of faith, wounded by the searing heat of the event, but still unshaken. Of course, they had only lost an “in-law,” where she had lost the one true love of her life and not by disease or accident or anything that might be considered “normal.” No, John had been shot in the face, his life of lesser value to the murderer than the money carried in her husband’s wallet.
God let it happen, Anne had reasoned. If He was God, if He is omnipotent, then He could have—should have—done something. But He didn’t, and that meant He was either a powerless pretender or criminally apathetic. Either way, He was not the God she had believed in since childhood, and not a God she wanted to associate with.
The old emotions rose to the surface like magma up a volcano’s flue, pushing, pressing, expanding until something had to give and the inevitable eruption would take place. Most eruptions came in silent tears as she sat in her dark home; sometimes the anger won, and those closest to her became the victims of catastrophe. It was why she left Ridgeline. It was why she had not spoken to her sister more than a handful of times over the last half-decade.
“An apology!” Anne said. She had uttered the phrase a score and more times. The words were spoken hotly, awash in the bile of long pent-up animosity aimed at the Divine. But each time she spoke the word, the indefinable emotion made itself known. The anger was cooling, the magma receding, and she felt puzzled.
Something rattled in the back of her mind, like an indistinguishable sound heard in the dead of night that awakens one from deep slumber. Instead of fear, the thing, the emotion, the presence was making itself welcome. Anne tried repeatedly to push it from her thoughts, preferring to wallow in the misery that had been her constant companion for five years. The feeling wouldn’t be evicted. Instead, it quietly pushed forward, expelling the bitter darkness with the glow of its own life.
It was an impossible task, Anne had decided as she steered her car home. It would be easier to empty the ocean with a teaspoon than expunge the sorrow she carried with her, but with each mile that passed under the tires of her car, more blackness dissolved. By the time she returned home, parked the car, and entered the house, she was dangerously close to feeling good.
She turned on no lights, fixed no refreshment for herself; instead she dropped her purse on the floor by the door as she shut it and turned the latch and walked through the dark room which was lit only by the front porch light as it pressed into the room though the glass panes of the front door. A few steps later she sat upon her sofa, eyes closed and mind confused. The anger was ebbing like a tide.
“Apology!” she said to the darkness. “Not as long as I live.”
The warmth had spread now, filling each brain cell and trickling down to her heart.
“I refuse to apologize to a God who let my husband . . . let someone kill . . .” She couldn’t finish the sentence; the words choked in her throat. “What does Perry know about it . . . Mr. Righteous Man . . . He can’t understand . . . doesn’t care . . .” She knew the thoughts were lies, each one, every one a fabrication meant to shield her from the truth.
Tears welled and brimmed, hands shook, emptiness filled with a wash of golden comfort—comfort she had avoided every day of the last five years. And with the comfort came peace. Still Anne fought back. It made no sense. Comfort and peace were what she needed, but it came with a price: To accept the offer, she had to admit she had been wrong, that God was not responsible for her husband’s death and that she was responsible for living in a purgatory of her own creation.
She had kept the room dark to avoid the light, but an illumination grew inside of her, and there was no denying it, no extinguishing it. The light wouldn’t be ignored, wouldn’t be sent away. Anne wanted to hate God, to withhold every positive emotion from Him. It was His fault, He was to blame. No, she wouldn’t apologize, she wouldn’t bend, she would feed the vicious animal of hatred and never let it weaken, never let it die.
The dam cracked.
The tears poured out.
The truth flooded in.
The fortress of lies had been breached, not by an invading army but by the constant, pervasive, unyielding love of God. Anne had always been aware of its presence; had always known that no matter how bitter she had become, no matter how abusive of God’s good name, she was still loved. She had resisted so fervently because to accept the peace God offered meant accepting the fact that John was dead and had died in a horrible way. To let peace reign, she had to leave behind the shield of anger.
Now there were no more shields. The hiding was over. She had been wrong, and she knew it.
Praying was hard. The only words Anne had directed heavenward had been curses, but new words needed to be uttered. No sentences formed in her mind, no formal phrases. Only two words: “I’m . . . I’m sorry.”
THE BUSINESS JET cut through the night sky, its lone passenger sitting in a darkened cabin, in a plush seat, staring out the window at the glistening drops of light below.
He recognized it from his previous flight south. This was his second flight over the central valley of California in as many days—third if he counted the return trip. Below him was one of the richest areas of farmland in the country. The soil below, when combined with the sweat of the farmer and migrant worker, yielded everything from grapes to almonds. The overfed stomachs of Americans were touched by the work that went on below. The high-pressure sodium lights on the ground looked hued with gold. The city below was Fresno, and the next stop was Bakersfield. His plane would land there as it had the day before.
And as before, he would do what he needed to do in an effective, efficient, untraceable way. That’s the way Rutherford Straight wanted it; it was the way Alex Olek would do it.
THE METAL BUCKET of the backhoe hovered in the air, its shaped metal teeth securely welded to steel gums. Perry nodded and the operator pushed a lever. The bucket dropped in an even motion and took a bite of the topsoil, a bite measured in hundreds of pounds. Smoothly the articulated arm of the big tool curled the bucket under, holding the dirt in place until it had completed
a ninety-degree swing to the left where it deposited the dirt in
a pile. The bucket returned and inhaled another load, then another, and another. Perry had to admire the work of the operator. He’d been hand-selected by Jack with the promise that he was the best heavy equipment operator on the West Coast. Watching the ease and confidence with which he did his work made Perry believe it.
“I’m back.”
Perry turned to see Sergeant Montulli standing next to him. “I thought you called it a night.”
“Nope. I said I was staying, and stay I will. One of my deputies told me that Detective Sanchez wanted me to call. Since we don’t have cell service tucked away as we are in these hills, I took a quick trip back to Tejon. Did I miss anything exciting?”
Perry laughed, partly from the irony of the question and partly because weariness was catching up with him. “You might say that.” He explained about the Site Six excavation and the discovery of the woman’s remains. He also mentioned the name they found etched inside the coffin.
“No way!” Montulli said. “I don’t believe it.”
“That’s your prerogative, Sergeant. I saw it with my own eyes, and I’m having trouble believing it too. Unless it can be shown to be a hoax, we have unearthed one of history’s most important people.”
“Can it be a hoax?”
“I suppose it’s possible, but I doubt it. Right now I’d have more trouble believing that it was a setup than in believing that the body of Mary Magdalene is resting up by the trailer.”
“Is that where your Dr. Curtis is?”
“Yes. He’s doing a cursory examination and taking still photos.”
“I imagine he has his work cut out for him,” Montulli said.
“And more is on the way,” Perry said, nodding at the hole being dug by the backhoe.
“So you gonna tell me what you expect to find?”
“Let’s not go there now, Sergeant. If I’m right, you’ll know soon. And remember that you’ve agreed not to say anything to anyone.”
“Unless it involves a crime. I’m not setting aside the law for you or anyone else.”
“I’m not asking you to. I’m just calling on your honor and discretion.”
Montulli nodded.
The two fell silent for a moment as each watched the graceful ballet of man and machine. “Sanchez had some news,” Montulli said finally. “The murdered man you found was a private detective named Dawes.”
Perry nodded. Anne had told him that much earlier, but he saw no sense in mentioning the conversation. He was uncertain if Anne should have been revealing such information since he was, technically, still a suspect. “News of his murder was aired on the eleven o’clock news in Bakersfield. A guy by the name of Willis called the sheriff’s department and said he had seen the man the day he died.”
“Really? When and where?” Perry asked.
“This Willis guy owns an aerial survey business with his brother. He told Sanchez that Dawes breezed in demanding an immediate survey and wanted pictures right away. Want to guess where he was surveying?”
“Here?” Perry remembered gazing at the sky when he first arrived at the site and seeing a small plane flying overhead. He wondered if he had been watching someone watching him.
“That’s right. Sanchez asked for copies of the photos, which they sent him over the Internet. He forwarded some of them to me.” He reached into his back pocket and pulled out several folded pieces of paper. “These were printed on plain paper so the quality is a little iffy, but they’re clear enough to make the point.”
Perry took the paper and glanced at it. He didn’t need to study it; he knew exactly what he was looking at. He had seen it from the air when he flew in the morning before. “That’s the site, all right. So we have one more piece of information indicating that he had us under surveillance.”
“But now we know he was working for someone else,” Montulli added. “We suspected that since he was a P.I., but Mr. Willis said the man mentioned his boss. That’s the word he used, ‘boss.’”
“Any idea who that might be?”
“No, but we think he’s from out of town. Willis offered to deliver the pictures in digital format. That seemed to please Dawes. Digital photos can be sent over the Internet. Sanchez is searching the man’s office even as we speak.”
“This late?”
“Like you, Mr. Sachs, some of us are dedicated to what we do.”
“I never thought otherwise, Sergeant. Is your detective going to trace Dawes’s e-mail?”
“He has people working on it. He said the photos were sent to a dummy account. It’s untraceable. You know what that means, don’t you?”
“It means that you can’t use the e-mail to track down Dawes’s contact.”
“It means more than that,” Montulli said seriously. “It means you’re not dealing with an amateur. I think you should be careful, Mr. Sachs.”
“That thought had already occurred to me. That’s why we’ve stepped everything up. Time only serves those who are against us.” Perry returned his attention to the backhoe. It moved like a graceful dinosaur, chewing up the ground one giant bucketful at a time.
“How deep does he need to go?” Montulli asked.
“The top of our target is fifteen meters down. It goes deeper than that, but we’re not certain how deep. We’ll have to bring in a larger excavator because the backhoe has depth limits.”
“So you just keep digging. It looks like you’re off to a good start.”
Perry studied the hole. The operator had opened a four-by-five-meter trench. Perry judged the hole to be two meters deep. The operator was making good progress. At this rate . . .
Suddenly the backhoe shuddered ominously.
“What was that?” Montulli said with alarm.
A rumble rolled through the ground, the backhoe convulsed, and then Perry saw something that froze the marrow in his bones.
“Jump!” he shouted to the operator. “Jump, jump!”
He saw the crewman grab the metal uprights that supported the metal roof above the cab and pull himself up. It was an act of desperation that came too late.
The ground opened up, and the multi-ton machine dropped like an elevator car suddenly detached from its cables. The backhoe fell awkwardly, pitching to the side. The worker fell with his machine. A cloud of dust and smoke rose from the opening as if hell itself had surfaced. Perry sprinted forward, stopping at the edge of a hole that now had to be considered a crater. Dust obliterated his view. “Hang on, partner,” Perry shouted. He was ashamed that he didn’t even know the worker’s name. He had left crew selection to Jack.
Montulli was immediately by his side, radio to his mouth. Perry heard something about the fire department, but he had no intention of waiting for them. Against every urge and desire, he held back for the smoke and dust to clear. He heard the diesel engine cut out and was thankful for that.
“What happened?” Jack asked. He and Gleason had been aiding Dr. Curtis. Now the three had joined him. A moment later Brent came running up, camera in hand.
“Ground gave way like a sinkhole,” Perry said. “I want rope, and I want it now!”
“Got it,” Jack said and disappeared.
“Gleason, get one of the Explorers over here.” Gleason didn’t waste time with words; he was off in a sprint to the closest four-wheel drive.
“The sides are still caving in,” Brent said. “How can that be?”
“The poor soul is going to be buried alive,” Curtis moaned.
Perry heard a cough and a deep moan. He took in the situation. Brent was right, the sides of the sinkhole were expanding, and as it did, it dumped more dirt in the direction of the downed man.
“Give me that,” Perry snapped, grabbing the camera from Brent. He studied it for a moment. “Light. How do you turn the light on?”
Brent reached over and pushed a button. The small halogen light blazed to life.
“What are you doing?” Montulli asked suspiciously. “I want you to wait for the fire department. They have the equipment to . . .”
Perry didn’t wait for the rest of the sentence. Instead, he stepped forward with a hop and disappeared down the hole.
THE HOUSE PROVED too confining for Anne. Something had happened to her the hour before. Something inside her that needed breaking had finally broken. The shattered pieces dissolved at her feet like cotton candy in the rain. She was worn out; the grief, the anger, the release, the submission to truth had been more grueling than any physical work she had ever done. While her energy level was close to empty, she felt full for the first time in half a decade.
The epiphany had been cleansing, cathartic. It had begun with a firm word from a man she barely knew, but the pointed admonition had punctured a hole in the darkness she had draped her mind and heart with. In that moment, a small amount of light had made its way in, and once in, it wouldn’t be denied.
Perry Sachs hadn’t brought about the change. Someone far more insightful and powerful had invaded her and dispelled the artificial wall of protection that kept nothing out, but that kept her in like a prisoner. God deserved her apology, and despite initial and hard-fought refusal, He had gotten it. She had uttered the words “I’m sorry” a hundred times, and with each utterance a layer of self-pity filth was washed away.
Her grief had been real and appropriate, but she’d nursed it into something that sorrow was never meant to be. In a moment, the years of conflict with God melted; in a second, the self-loathing and hatred evaporated under the loving light of God. She had left Him years before, but she now knew He had never left her.
In a dark living room, on a dark night, a woman scarred by pain and regret and poisoned by hatred and anger was healed from the inside. It didn’t come with a refrain from the “Hallelujah Chorus”; it arrived without sermon or Bible study. It came without a preacher. One woman, one God, one healing.
How long the moment lasted, Anne couldn’t tell. Perhaps it had been an hour, maybe two, but it happened. Her prayer was simple, uncluttered, and devoid of pretension. The prayer flew heavenward on wings of honesty. The answer came like a fresh, cleansing brook, bubbling through the deepest areas of her soul.
She drank in the forgiveness, gulped the understanding, and absorbed the unmeasured, indescribable love. Sleep was impossible. Weary as she was, spent as she was, she had to move outside to find a space big enough to contain the release that radiated from her.
Anne left her home and drove. At first she traveled with
no destination in mind, but then found herself heading from town, toward the place she had last spoken to Perry. The hour was late, but he might still be there. He was a man consumed with a cause, and she suspected that sleep was a secondary thought to him now.
Behind her, red lights flashed, and the wail of a siren wafted through the closed windows of the car. Dutifully, she pulled over, and the Tejon fire department drove by in a pumper, ambulance, and chief’s car. Anne followed, and her apprehension rose with each minute.
They were headed out of the city.
The fire department, like the police, was handled by county departments. When she saw them turn onto the dirt road that led to Perry’s site, her heart began to race. A new fear inundated her mind.