45

As the courtroom began to empty, I scanned the room for Sheriff Haywood and Deputy St. Martin. But they were gone.

“The two of them ran out of here like the place was on fire,” Heather explained. “The very second that the judge ruled in your favor.”

Something came to mind, and I whirled around to Attorney Canterelle. “About that favor you were going to do for me, finding the identity of the attorney who sat next to Heather at the ABA . . .”

“I’ve been working on it. But now that I see y’all found her, do y’all still need to know?”

I told him yes. My private reasons for wanting that information had changed by then. But I still needed it, and more than ever. It had to do with my phantom caller with the digitally distorted voice. I had a hunch the caller was the same lawyer sitting next to Heather during my speech, the person who knew about the voodoo ceremony planned at Bayou Bon Coeur and who led Heather to Delbert Baldou.

I pressed Canterelle again to get me the lawyer’s ID, adding that her name might be Deidre.

Canterelle said, “It’s complicated. I located an ID that the lawyer used to get into the session, but the name doesn’t match. Now I’ve got a friend who’s in the facial recognition software business, and he’s running the video that caught the faces of the first few rows in the audience and checking it against a federal database. Y’all should have an answer shortly.”

It was almost eight in the evening when we hustled out of the courthouse and into the dusk outside. As Heather handed over my cell phone, I told her we had to rush to Dead Point along the banks of the Mississippi.

On the way, I called the sheriff’s department for Plaquemines Parish and said I needed to talk to Sheriff Haywood immediately. That I knew he was on his way back from federal court because I had just been with him in the courtroom. I gave my name and cell number and said that if the sheriff wasn’t available, then Deputy St. Martin needed to call me back instead, but that it was urgent and I needed to hear back from someone.

Dead Point was a good hour away. I laid my cell down on the console of the Mustang and waited for a return call.

Heather said, “Back in that courtroom . . . that was so amazing.” She was smiling. “So that was what you did, all those years as a lawyer?”

“Something like that. Never represented myself before, though.” Then I smiled back. “By the way, a lot of the victory belongs to you. Nice work on the petition.”

I saw a wide grin from Heather.

But inside I was in turmoil. I wondered when it would be the right time. When I would tell her what Dr. Schlosser told me. What those legal papers said about her biological father. And what they failed to say about me.

And then I thought about Ashley Linderman and wondered when I might expect a call back from her.

A half hour into the drive we passed a gas station with a small sundries shop. It was getting dark, so I dashed in and bought the biggest flashlight I could find. I told Heather, “There are no lights out there at Dead Point.”

For the second time in two days we took the turn off of 23 and onto Diamond Road, with the Mississippi River to our left, and then to the dirt road cutting through low scrub brush until we could see the rusting metal sign arching overhead announcing River Bend Cemetery. This time the gate was closed. Heather scampered out of the car and opened it. Then the bumpy ride over the rough terrain that had once housed the caskets and crypts of the departed, before flood tides finally forced the graveyard caretakers to dig them up and relocate them.

We arrived at Dead Point but hadn’t received a call back from either the sheriff or the deputy. I jostled the Mustang across the field and stopped close to the banks of the Mississippi, and we jumped out.

In the shrouding darkness, we would have to listen for the sound of ships approaching, knowing there was a chance we had already missed the awful one, the vessel carrying its young cargo. We had no idea what kind of boat we were waiting for. Our informant, Henry Bosant, hadn’t told us. At first we heard only the lapping of waves against the shoreline and the wind in the trees, but nothing else. The moon was poking in and out of a thick blanket of clouds, and the river itself was almost invisible in the inky night, yet we knew it was there because we could hear it rushing along the banks.

Heather and I stood silent, fixed at attention. Waiting.

I put a call into the sheriff’s office again, received the same message, and told the dispatcher that it was urgent and they needed to meet with me at Dead Point immediately. Then the same reply, that my call would be noted and that Sheriff Haywood and Deputy St. Martin “would be advised.”

More waiting. Then a sound. In the distance, the low hum of a boat engine approaching and the swishing of a wake as a river craft cut through the water.

I held the big spotlight in my hand but hadn’t turned it on.

Heather asked if we should turn on the Mustang’s headlights.

“No, too wide a beam. And I don’t want to alert them to the fact that a car is at the banks of the river. Flashlight’s better.”

As the boat was approaching, I noticed a periodic beam from the vessel’s bow light flashing on and then turning off. They must have been checking their bearings on the river but didn’t want to keep the light on, possibly to avoid detection.

By the sound of the engine, this was no oceangoing ship. It was a smaller craft. I knew there was a chance that this boat had nothing to do with child sex slavery or some bloody voodoo cult.

When it sounded as if the boat was parallel to our position at Dead Point, I ran up, right to the water’s edge, with Heather close behind me. The clouds parted a little and I could make out the outline of the craft in the darkness. It looked like a long fishing boat or a trawler, with a cabin area belowdecks. There were a few portholes along the starboard side, facing us. A dim light shone in the cabin, but something covered the porthole windows.

My index finger was on the slide button of my big spotlight. I pointed it straight at the outline of the boat and clicked it on. The beam cut through the hot mist rising off the river and lit up the boat.

There, within a porthole, a hand was holding open a curtain. Then a face peering out. I looked closer, keeping my beam fixed on it. It was a young girl. Her eyes were half-closed and her mouth was wide-open, face contorted in a scream, hands waving next to her face, pleading.

I heard Heather yelp next to me. “It’s a girl. They’ve got a girl. . . .”

Then some confusion in the porthole. Something was happening. The girl’s face appeared again, but only for a moment. She was struggling with someone. She was yanked to the side and I saw who had done it. For just a fleeting second a man’s face was in the porthole, staring out with a fierce expression; then he pulled the curtain shut and the lights went out in the cabin.

Feeling numb and gut-punched, I clicked off my spotlight. Heather was weeping softly next to me.

I put my hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry. There was nothing we could do.” But those words seemed so pitifully inadequate and pathetic. Even cold.

Was I growing callous to the depravity that I had been fighting ever since my spiritual awakening? I prayed to God that wasn’t true.

I looked at Heather. She was still staring at the dark flow of the river rolling past us. She was sniffling, trying hard to hold it back. Suddenly she burst into tears.

Heather turned to me and sobbed in my arms. I held her yet felt a catastrophic tension pulling me in two. Wanting to share with her everything that the Lord had shown me about the separation of the darkness from the light, and that even with all the horror and wretchedness of the devil —and the struggles against the world and the flesh —there was still hope because it had all been overcome by Christ the King, whose power was so cosmic that even the grave couldn’t contain it.

But Heather was not my daughter to console, I told myself. Genetically, biologically, and in every way in which a father and daughter can be linked through the mystery of conception and birth —I was none of that, merely a third party. Just a friendly stranger to her now. Even an unwitting impostor. The truth of that still had to be spoken to Heather. It would lie in my mouth like poison until I said it aloud.

I finally said, “Let’s get back to the car. Someone may try to track us to this spot.”

As we turned from the river, a fire had been lit inside me. The carnage had to stop. The terrorizing of young girls, the cruel caravans as they were carried off to slavery —it had happened right in front of me. On my watch.

But no more. If God had called me to this, then he would empower me to stop it.

We were halfway to the rental when a pair of headlights came roaring down the path toward us and broke into the open where our Mustang was parked. I recognized the jacked-up pickup as it skidded to a stop. When the driver opened the door and the dome light was on, I knew who he was. The skinhead male with a full beard who had chased us down the highway outside of Port Sulphur.

“Get in the car,” I told Heather, “and lock the doors.”

“But —”

“Now!” I shouted.

The driver stomped toward me. I didn’t see a weapon, but I was already getting the signal. My senses were filled with the old incendiary scent of a landfill on fire; of dead animals, garbage, and death. Which meant that the man coming at me had been taken over by one of the lower-echelon demonic thugs. I knew what would come next: I would soon see the demonic being that had taken him over, in all of its grotesque essence.

When he was about ten feet from me, things started to happen. He hunched his shoulders, and his arms flailed in all directions. Before me, his face transformed into the demonic creature within: the essence of the thing was like some kind of hairy spider with large lifeless eyes.

He screamed in a voice that was high and screechy like an untuned violin, “Why have you come to torment me?”

“Who do you work for?” I demanded. “Who’s your boss?”

“You can’t defeat him. The overlord is too strong. The king of lust and pain. The destroyer of children. He rapes. Ruins. And he’ll ruin you.”

A sudden, inexplicable calm washed over me. I held out a hand to him. “You can be rid of this.”

“Get away,” he yelled. “Leave us alone, or you’ll be chopped up. Fed to the alligators.”

“No, I won’t. You know who I serve. I serve the Son of the living God.”

He shrieked so loudly that it echoed off the river and through the woods, like a creature whose leg had been caught in the jaws of a trap.

I took a few steps toward him. He backed up and stopped, then lunged at me and grabbed me by the throat, no longer the hellish insect creature but a man again, yet there was no power in his grip.

“I am going to help you,” I said as I removed his hands and forced him down to his knees. Then the words, from a place within me, began to flow out. “In the name of Christ the Lord, and by the power of his blood, and by the power of his resurrection, I cast you out, you foul spirit. Get out of this man, into the outer darkness, back to the dry, desolate, godless place where you came from. Out!”

The man screamed, shivered and shook, and collapsed. He was still for a while, lying there on the ground. Then he began to move. After wiping the spittle from his mouth and beard, he looked up, his eyes darting around.

He asked, “Where am I?”

“By the river. At Dead Point,” I said. “Welcome back to the land of the living.”