THROUGHOUT THE SUMMER and fall, Kuni brought me several Mysterious Stranger sightings, but they were always frustratingly word-of-mouth. There was never any video or audio record. Then a weird little story came up in Morris County, weird enough to make me do something I hadn’t done in years. I actually went and investigated it.
One cold morning in October, a young New Jersey state trooper had been driving east on I-78. (He was a big fan of the Inquiring Mind, he told me; in fact, he’d been watching the Nut Log on his carputer that morning.) Just past Morristown he’d found a green Super-Size SUV, well off the highway in the undergrowth. The car was empty. No signs of collision. The engine was warm and stalled in drive. He figured it’d been there an hour, tops.
In the driver’s seat was what he called a “pool” of clothes: men’s boxers inside a pair of pants with the belt done up and the legs hanging over the seat, a shirt draped over the back of the seat with a necktie still tied, on the floor a pair of shoes with socks inside them. “Looked as if the guy had been extracted from his clothes,” he said.
He checked in the bushes to see if anyone was dead, sick, and/or naked. Nothing. The car was registered to a Risen Lamb–affiliated church in Morristown. When he called, the pastor’s wife answered and said the car sounded like her husband’s. She was at the scene in minutes.
The trooper played me the car’s audiovisual record. (Against regs, he said, but hey, anything for the Inquiring Mind.) He was parked on the shoulder, so the cam couldn’t pick up much in the bushes, but the audio was pretty good.
The woman’s name was Bobbi Coombs, wife of Pastor Darby Coombs. She appeared briefly on the audiovisual, immaculately groomed, wearing a white fox-fur coat, then disappeared into the bushes to identify the car. The cop said she took one look at the front seat and fell to her knees, yelling over and over, “O Lord, take me too! Don’t leave me behind, Jesus!”
The cop didn’t have a clue about what this meant and didn’t know the proper procedure. The wife seemed hysterical, and he had an abandoned car with possibly a naked husband wandering around.
Then an old beat-up brown GMC van with New York plates pulled up on the shoulder in front of Bobbi’s SSSUV. A man in a dark hooded fleece got out and walked around the front of his vehicle into the undergrowth. He looked stocky, but the cam was wide angle and flattened people out. His hood was up so his face wasn’t visible.
The newcomer appeared to know Bobbi. The cop said he was big and dark-complexioned, might have been Latino. He spoke slowly, almost soothingly, as if trying to keep a lid on the situation. He said, “Bobbi, what happened here?”
“It’s Darby,” she said. “He’s been Raptured!”
The guy explained to the trooper. “The lady believes her husband has been snatched up to Heaven in the Rapture by Jesus, and she wants Jesus to take her too. Right, Bobbi?”
She nodded, tears running down her cheeks. The trooper said that didn’t help him much.
The guy in the fleece got Bobbi gently to her feet. He said, “Bobbi, don’t be upset when I tell you this. Your husband hasn’t been Raptured.”
“But his clothes are the way it’s supposed to happen,” she protested. “Like in the old Left Behind movies? I don’t want to be left behind!” She started crying again.
The stranger spoke so quietly here, the audio didn’t pick it all up: “Bobbi . . . no knowing . . . death will come . . . nothing . . . Bible . . . invention. . . .” But this could be heard clearly: “There is no such thing as the Rapture.”
Bobbi started yelling. “Who are you? Why are you haranguing me?”
The trooper yelled at him too. “I thought you knew her! Get outa here! You ain’t helping none!”
The stranger stayed calm. He had something else to say. “Bobbi, Darby isn’t with Jesus. He’s with your church’s financial manager, Sheila. They’re flying to Costa Rica today with three quarters of a million dollars in church funds. I’m sorry,” he went on, “but right now they’re in the Ramada Inn at Newark Airport in Room Four-oh-two, having . . . sex.”
She exploded. “How dare you! Who are you?”
The trooper tried to hustle the stranger toward his van, but he didn’t budge. “Call the Ramada Inn at Newark Airport, Bobbi,” he said, and gave her the number.
Bobbi hesitated, as if she didn’t want to know if the stranger was right, but she repeated the number to her phone. The hotel answered. She asked for Room 402.
The phone rang several times; then a man’s voice answered. She started to shake violently. “Darby?” she quavered. “What are you doing, honey?” The man gabbled something and hung up. Bobbi burst into tears again.
The cop said he had a dozen loose ends, but the number-one priority was that if the stranger was right about the couple he could be right about the money. He ran to his car to alert the Newark police. The drama unfolded on his two-way. Everything the stranger had said was correct. Darby and Sheila had checked out in a rush and were getting in their rental car when the cops showed. You could hear them protesting on the radio. They had a briefcase with just under eight hundred thousand bucks in negotiable instruments and two first-class tickets to Costa Rica.
But by the time all the excitement died down and the trooper was ready to take his statement, the stranger and his van had gone.
Why did I have this sudden interest in a sordid tale of Baptists sinning? Because—although this was a very different sighting from the previous ones—I had a hunch this man was our Mysterious Stranger. There were no disciples and no healing, true, and the setting was hardly his usual one, but there was the beat-up van, his manner, and some possibly paranormal power.
Normally I would’ve lost interest in someone like the Mysterious Stranger, but something about this guy kept niggling at me. It might have been my need after years of humping dreck to report a real story, but I’d begun to toy with an intriguing idea.
“What if,” I said to Kuni one night, over our now-regular evening beer, “the M.S. seems different because he is different? What if he’s part of some larger plan, which is why he doesn’t fit the usual nut-or-hustler mold?”
“What other category is there besides nuts and hustlers?”
“How about messiah-in-training? Someone being groomed as a religious leader?”
Kuni thought about this. “There’s someone behind him, you mean? That would explain why he doesn’t take money. But why? And who?”
“Let’s say someone way up the Christian fundo food chain has decided there’s some future in the one segment of the population they’ve always ignored: the poor. Not money but power. The working class are all the loyal opposition have left, vote-wise. What better way to get to them than through a charismatic young “messiah,” one of their own, who heals folks without medical care, doesn’t con them out of their hard-earned dough, but becomes a complete hero to them so they’ll do anything he says? Like ‘Vote for Sparrow 4.’ We’d be outta business for good. The country really would be a one-party state.”
“And if you’re right, a fantastic story,” Kuni added. “But no one would run it, would they? It’d be suicide.”
“I think I know someone who might,” I said.
Kuni got that hungry, excited look young journalists used to get when they smelled a story. He raised his stein. We clinked. “Count me in,” he said.
There was one major aspect of the latest Mysterious Stranger story that fit right into my theory: the Risen Lamb affiliation of Coombs’s church. It answered the question: How did the stranger know about Pastor Coombs’s new twist on the old staging-your-own-death scam? And when to show up and where the couple were going? Simple: Someone at Coombs’s church—or higher up the Pure Holy Baptist hierarchy—had gotten wind of the scheme and told it to the M.S., who’d then ridden in like a hero, using “miraculous” powers to bring crime and sin to justice.
There were “con” aspects. The church wasn’t in a poor neighborhood and didn’t involve poor people. But word of the incident could make its way onto the grapevine of the poor. The M.S. would look good for exposing the hypocrisy of well-heeled Christians.
There was a coda to the story. It came up when I interviewed Bobbi. Apparently she hadn’t told the cop or anyone else this part.
“The stranger was getting back in his van,” she said. “I yelled at him to wait and ran over. I felt horrible. The fancy fur coat Darby had just bought me felt like . . . dirty laundry. I asked the stranger who he was. He didn’t answer. He just took my hands. And in my head—he didn’t say it out loud—I heard the words, I am your Savior.
“I had a feeling of being . . . safe . . . with him?” Bobbi went on. “That all the ugliness and sadness of my marriage didn’t matter. That in the future he would be there. We stood like that for I don’t know how long. Then I said, ‘What should I do now?’
“He smiled—he had a great smile—and said, ‘Sell all you have and follow me.’ Then he kissed me on the forehead and drove away.”
The M.S. sounded like he had real charisma, the kind he would need to pull a mission like this off. I was getting surer that something was going on here—and that someone was behind it.
Plus, thanks to the cop’s audiovisual, I had his license plate.