Mike’s eyes fluttered open. He saw a wall-mounted TV playing an old episode of The Simpsons.For some reason Homer’s ass was on fire; he ran around, screaming, trying to find a spot to put out the flames.
Mike heard a soft chuckle and his eyes cut sideways to a young, attractive woman with short blond hair who was busy making a note on a chart. She wore a white lab coat and had a stethoscope around her neck.
A doctor or a nurse. He was in a hospital.
(Terry)
(who?)
he moved a hand to his face and when he touched his forehead
(Terry is Jonah’s nurse)
he felt thick gauze bandaging packed along the right side of his head.
(I was following Terry. I followed her to a gas station and then I climbed inside her Volvo and Terry freaked out and—)
“Sarah,” he croaked.
“No, Mr. Sullivan, don’t lift your head up.”
Spikes of pain flared and his head crashed back against the pillow. Oh Jesus. Oh Christ. He turned on his side, wanting to throw up.
“That’s it, just lie back and relax,” the woman said, and stepped up next to him. “I’m Dr. Tracy.”
“I need to talk to the police.”
“Slow down, Mr. Sullivan.”
“You don’t understand.”
“I do understand. The FBI is here.”
Mike blinked, stared at her.
“That’s right. There’s an agent posted outside your room who is very anxious to speak with you, but before he does, I need you to answer some questions for me. Tell me your first name.”
“Michael.”
“And where do you live?”
“Belham. Belham, Massachusetts. It’s just outside of Boston. Where am I?”
“Vermont. Do you know how you got here?”
“I remember being in the woods.”
“Were you alone?”
“No. I was with a woman. Terry Russell. She was Jonah’s hospice nurse. Please, I need to speak with the FBI right now.”
“Just stick to answering my questions for the moment, okay?”
The doctor launched into a list of seemingly ridiculous questions: what was today’s date; the year; the name of the president. Mike answered all of them correctly, and then the doctor went on to explain that he had suffered a grade-two concussion. The CT scan they ran came back fine: no intercranial bleeding.
“We’re going to keep you for the night,” the doctor said. “Tonight a nurse will come in and wake you up. If you don’t wake up easily, if you become confused or if you start vomiting, we’re going to keep you here, run some more tests. I think you’ll be fine, but for the next couple of weeks, you’re going to have to give your brain some time to heal. That means no physical activity, no work, lots of rest.”
“I can’t remember how I got here.”
“Sometimes with a head injury patients experience what’s called spotty amnesia. It’s completely normal. Your head took quite a few knocks.”
No argument there. Behind whatever drugs they had given him, Mike could feel, very faintly, tiny throbs along the right side of his skull.
The door swung open again and in walked a suit-and-tie guy with neatly trimmed blond hair and an all-business look on his face.
“Mr. Sullivan, I’m Special Agent Mark Ferrell.”
“My daughter,” Mike said again.
Ferrell’s face changed slightly—closed up, Mike thought, and he felt his heart skip a beat.
“We’ll get into all of that,” Ferrell said. “You feel up to talking?”
Before Mike could answer, the doctor said, “Go easy on him.”
“I will,” Ferrell said. “Scout’s honor.”
“Good,” the doctor said. “Then you won’t mind me hanging around, see if you live up to your word.”
Ferrell sat on the heating register and Mike said, “Terry Russell.”
“In custody. She gave the state police one hell of a highway chase.”
Mike remembered Terry on her knees, praying. He remembered cocking the trigger, wanting to scare her. Now that’s not exactly true, now is it? No. He did want to scare her, yes, but that other part of him had wanted to put another bullet in her. The thought hadn’t scared him so much as made him sleepy, and he remembered taking a step back from her, and then another, and then … Shit. What was he missing?
The doctor said, “Are you okay, Mr. Sullivan?”
“I don’t remember what happened in the woods.”
“I’m sure it will come back to you,” Ferrell said. “I have agents speaking with Terry Russell right now, and the FBI is assisting with the investigation in Belham. Her buddy Lundi’s in protective custody. He’s looking to trade information for a lighter sentence. And we have Terry’s laptop. Now, we’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s going on, but I’ll tell you what I know so far. You don’t understand something, you’ve got a question, just jump right in and ask, okay?”
Mike nodded. Why was Ferrell speaking so slowly?
He’s not, a voice answered. It’s your head. It was used as a pinball and now you’re loaded with drugs, so make sure you pay attention. You might only have one shot here.
Ferrell said, “What we know at this point is that Terry Russell and Anthony Lundi are part of a radical pro-life, ultra-Christian group that called themselves The Soldiers of Truth and Light. We believe this group has been operating for the better part of two decades. What this group does is kidnap young children from parents who’ve had abortions, brainwash these kids into thinking their parents are dead, and then these kids are placed into the Christian homes of adults who, for one reason or another, can’t have kids of their own. The new parents of these abducted children also belong to the group—that’s how they’ve maintained this level of secrecy for so long—and a good majority of them live in other countries, mainly Canada. This group operates in an Al Qaeda—like fashion strictly through encrypted email. They had members working in abortion clinics all over the country, gathering data on various women, who they were—”
“Terry told you all of this?” Mike couldn’t believe Terry would turn over this information. She had refused to talk with a gun pressed to her head, why would she talk now?
“Terry’s refusing to cooperate,” Ferrell said. “Now her friend Lundi? He’s an ex-cop, so he knows how the game is played. At first he didn’t want to talk, but when we told him we had recovered the laptop, well, he practically started singing.”
“No.”
“No what?”
“She broke the laptop. I saw it. The screen was gone.”
“Ah. My fault. I assume everyone’s familiar with computers. Yes, technically, she broke the laptop. But she didn’t break the most important piece, which is the hard drive. We took that baby out, transferred it into another computer and once our boys hacked their way past the security, we were good to go. What we’ve uncovered so far is Terry’s address book with the names of all these people, addresses and phone numbers. And we have copies of her emails from the past three months. She didn’t know it, but her email program was set to auto-archive every email she received or sent.”
That explained why Terry had been in such a rush to move the laptop out of the house. I told her about the abortions and she panicked, figured that it was only a matter of time until the police came knocking—and if they did, if for some reason they took the laptop into evidence, then they’d be able to examine her hard drive, see what was stored on it.
“Terry made some phone calls on a cell phone during her drive,” Ferrell said. “It looks like she called some of the members of her group, who then turned around and alerted the families—you know, got them moving. You feeling okay?”
“Just a little sleepy. Don’t stop talking.” He was afraid that if Ferrell stopped talking, he would fall back asleep and his hope would evaporate and when he woke up someone would come in and say this was a dream, I’m sorry,Mr. Sullivan, so sorry.
“There was quite a lot of information on Jonah in these emails,” Ferrell said. “The first girl he allegedly molested all those years ago? The mother of the girl was a part of Terry’s group, and she convinced her daughter to go along with it. The little girl conveniently dropped the charges right before it went to court, but it didn’t matter. The seed of doubt was already planted.”
“I’m not following.”
“Terry’s group hated Jonah because they knew he granted forgiveness to women who had had abortions. Jonah represented—and I’m quoting here—‘the continuing moral decay of the Catholic Church.’ They believed Jonah had no business being a priest, so what this group did was pin the disappearance of the three girls on him.”
Wait. Was Ferrell saying Jonah was innocent? That couldn’t be right.
Mike said, “Merrick found the items underneath the floorboard in Jonah’s bedroom. He found audiotapes.”
“Terry planted all of it,” Ferrell said. “And Lundi planted the jacket on the cross. It was pure coincidence that Jonah walked around the top of the hill that night, but it didn’t matter if he found the jacket or if someone else did. When the jacket was found, you would ID it, and then the police would head straight to Jonah’s and put him under the microscope again.”
Jonah’s voice from the night he had called: I’m going to die in peace. You’re not going to take that away from me. Not you, not the police, not the press. You stay away from me or this time I’ll send you to rot in jail.
“So why go through all this when Jonah was already dying?” Ferrell said. “They wanted to prolong his suffering. Jonah admitted to Terry that he was terrified of dying alone in a jail cell. All he wanted was to live out the last part of his life in peace, to die in his home. When it didn’t look like the police were going to arrest Jonah, Terry and Lundi concocted the idea of burning him. Of course, Lundi knew the police would start an investigation, so they had to pin it on someone.”
“Lou,” Mike said.
“You got it. Lundi knew your old man was poking around Jonah’s house, so Lundi set him up. It was Lundi who was waiting behind the shed that night, Lundi who threw the Molotov cocktail. Lundi drops your old man’s lighter and some cigarette butts and guess who the police are going to nail to the wall? We’ve already contacted your father’s lawyer.”
Mike’s attention was still focused on Jonah. “So Jonah was …” He couldn’t get the words out.
Ferrell nodded. “Innocent. His suicide was staged. Terry loaded him up on morphine, and Lundi slung Jonah over his shoulder—not hard to do since Jonah was so emaciated at this point. Police come in, find the tape with your daughter’s voice on it, do their work and find the single ligature mark around Jonah’s neck and given Jonah’s history, it looks like they have a suicide on their hands. Case closed. The extra morphine in his system didn’t raise any red flags because Jonah was using it to treat his cancer.”
Then Mike remembered Terry’s words about Jonah: When the rope was slipped around his neck, he didn’t fight it because he knew he had sinned by forgiving those murdering whores. He will face God’s punishment because God’s punishment is swift.
Mike pictured Jonah struggling against the noose tightening around his neck as the knowledge of what had really happened to him screamed inside his head. Mike tried to imagine how Jonah confronted that last moment of his life.
Only God knows what is true.
Innocent. All this time Jonah had been innocent. All this time he had been telling the truth.
And I tried to kill him—twice.
Mike felt a cold sweat break across his skin.
Ferrell said, “They made this poor son of a bitch suffer right up until the very end. When Lundi fitted the noose around Jonah’s neck, Lundi confessed to Jonah what they had done to him and then kicked him off the stump. It’s all detailed in the emails between Terry and Lundi.”
Ferrell’s cell phone rang.
“This whole operation is so amazingly simple it borders on brilliant. Excuse me for a moment,” he said and then walked over to the far corner of the room, Mike watching as the agent pressed the phone against his ear and spoke in whispers.
Only God knows what is true.
Mike’s eyes felt heavy. He shut them and kept himself awake by focusing on the agent’s voice, the clicking of his shoes. They were going to find Sarah. Mike knew that. No God would bring him this far, this close, only to make her disappear again. God wouldn’t be that cruel twice.
Mike fell asleep.
“Mr. Sullivan?”
The FBI agent’s voice. Mike opened his eyes and saw that the room was dark.
“I just got the word,” Ferrell said, and broke into a smile. “We’ve got her. We’ve found your daughter.”