I took a shower and pulled open the drapes. It was still dark outside, the static lights of the terminal and the moving ones on aircraft shimmering through the heavy drizzle that pattered against the pane. Our plan had me leaving the hotel at eight, so that I would be in Tyler County before ten. That left plenty of time before dark to find the Antichurch’s facility on the road between Warren and Fred. Quincy would keep a mile or so behind me, using the locating device to track me. He was to use his own discretion about coming to my aid if anything suspicious happened. The Bureau’s Houston field office was involved, but its operatives had been told to keep their distance.
After I’d dressed, I checked the weapons in the bag I’d picked up. There was a combat knife in its sheath and a Glock 19 semiautomatic with two clips. I ejected a shell and examined it. As far as I could tell, it was the real thing. Although I didn’t fully trust Peter Sebastian, I couldn’t see why he would let me go into Rothmann’s den firing blanks.
I logged on to the operation’s secure site and read a report that Major Hexton had filed late last night. The body of a thirty-nine-year-old male had been found near the turnpike about ten miles north of Portland. His throat had been crushed. A few yards from the body was a black Jeep Grand Cherokee. The number plate squared with one logged earlier in the day by a witness in the diner across the road from police headquarters, who had come forward last night. The assumption was that the driver, a woman, had made her way to the turnpike and hitched either north or south. A call was out for anyone who had seen or picked her up, but a lot of the traffic was interstate so drivers either might not have heard it or ignored it.
So what the hell was going on? Could this second woman have been on my tail as well? Why had she killed the man? Had he seen something he shouldn’t have? That didn’t feel right. Who was the woman? The last thing I needed was someone who could kill with a single blow after me. In addition to Sara, that is.
I checked out and had the Mercedes brought to the front of the hotel. I looked around surreptitiously, but there were no women apart from hotel staff in the vicinity. No sign of Quincy, either. All was as it should be.
For speed, I took I-10 to Beaumont and then headed north toward the Big Thicket. At first I thought I was back in Cajun country in Louisiana. I’d gone on a wild trip there with some other crime writers after a conference in New Orleans-we ate gumbo, drank beer, sweated buckets and made enough noise to scare off any man-eating creatures.
The forest grew thicker the farther north I got, and there was no shortage of lumber trucks-in that respect, the area was like Maine, but with more humidity and a lot more insect life. I could believe that runaway slaves and draft dodgers had made use of the Big Thicket in the old days. It struck me that the difficulty of tracking people down in the swampy terrain might have attracted Rothmann, too. Then again, there were signs of the oil industry encroaching, which would have reduced his privacy.
I made it to Warren and stopped for a cup of coffee. There was a pamphlet about the area in the diner. Apparently there were eight different vegetation zones in the Big Thicket preserve, ranging from palmetto hardwood flatlands to stream flood plains, whatever those were. They harbored over eighty species of tree and sixty kinds of shrubs. Since I’d lived in cities on the other side of the ocean all my life, a lot of the fauna was unknown to me: loblolly pine, bluejack oak, tupelo and sundew. I breathed in and got a distinct blast of nature in the raw-swelling, burgeoning and slightly rotten. Again, just the place for Rothmann and his Nazi Satanists.
I sprayed on some insect repellent and buttoned my cuffs. It wasn’t raining anymore, but the humidity was heavy-duty. Fortunately, the Mercedes had a great aircon system. As I drove through the town, I wondered what the locals did when they weren’t working. There was no shortage of churches and I remembered I was in the heartland of the Southern Baptists. Some of them believed in the reality of Satan as much as the Antichurch did, but they expected the faithful to be taken up in the so-called Rapture, while the rest of us stayed on ground level to wait for Armageddon. It struck me that the Antichurch would have found more followers down south than in sparsely populated Maine. Could that be why the annual gathering was happening here?
Then again, where was ‘here’? I found access road 1943 and set off down it slowly, looking from side to side. None of the buildings looked likely candidates. Soon I came to signs on the right for the Turkey Creek Trail. According to the pamphlet, walkers would traverse a pine-hardwood forest cut with sandy knolls, then forests of loblolly and short-leaf pines, white and red oak, and others. Paradise for a nature lover, but the numerous unnumbered gravel tracks made it hell to check out thoroughly. The calls of strange birds filled the woods and I began to wonder if my boots were thick enough to repel snake bites. I was as lost for clues as Hansel and Gretel. Then it struck me that Antichurch members like Nora Jacobsen would be coming from far away and would need help to identify the hidden premises. I continued on 1943, swiveling my head until my neck began to ache. Unshaven guys with disintegrating baseball caps and dented pickups honked at me and I waved at them like a dumb tourist. Maybe I should just have asked where the devil worshippers hung out.
And then, without immediately understanding what it meant, I saw the mark on the left side of the road. It was about six feet up the thick trunk of a tree I couldn’t identify. The bark had been scraped away and in the foot-square space a red cross had been painted, the upper part of the vertical much longer than the lower. The Antichurch’s upturned cross. Eureka.
I got down from the SUV and took out my cell phone to send a text to Quincy.
No signal. That was hardly surprising, given the tree cover. He would be able to track me with the responder, as long as it functioned in this environment. Too bad-I wasn’t going to wait. My heart rate had accelerated. I was going to find the bastard Rothmann and tear his head off. I got back into the car and drove down a narrow track. As soon as I saw a gap in the trees, I turned in and got the Mercedes as far out of the way as I could. When I opened the door, I noticed a fleshy plant where I was going to put my feet. A putrid smell rose from it, attracting flies and other insects.
It seemed I was close to the rotting heart of darkness.
Putting the pistol and knife in my pockets, I struck off through the woods, keeping the track to my right. I took cover behind a tree when I heard a vehicle approach and watched as a pair of worryingly severe guys in a pristine pickup negotiated the track. The vehicle soon vanished behind the foliage. I headed after it.
The first rustle in the bushes ahead didn’t bother me. The following ones did-they got louder and shook the leaves. I stopped and pulled out the Glock. A bundle of bristles with two wickedly curved tusks on the front pelted toward me, swerving at the last moment. I found myself on my backside, breathing heavily. That must have been one of the feral hogs mentioned in the pamphlet. I laughed out loud, having not come across heavily armed suckling pig before.
I should have kept quiet. That way I might have heard what came up behind me. As it was, I turned too late and caught only a glimpse of a demon’s face with fangs much bigger than the hog’s.
Then I lost the light.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome our most generous sponsor, Mr. Rudi Crane!’
The toastmaster gave the small man to his right on the raised table a wide and disingenuous smile. Crane did not return it. One of the many blessings that the Lord had conferred upon him was the ability to detect insincerity instantly. That had been a useful tool in his rise to the upper echelons of American business, as well as in his church. He knew exactly which senior Southern Baptists were worthy. Unfortunately, there were very few.