They had almost reached the north end of the block when Baumberg said,
"There. What about that place?"
It was a two-story Spanish house, light beige stucco with a tile roof, half hidden by large trees, banks of veronica, and rows of azaleas. The streetlight shone on a real estate company's sign that stood on the lawn, near the sidewalk. The house was for sale, and no lights glowed in any of its rooms.
"Maybe it's unoccupied," Baumberg said.
"No such luck," O'Hara said.
"It's worth taking a look."
"I guess so."
O'Hara drove to the next block and parked at the curb. Carrying an airline flight bag that he had packed at the church, he got out of the car, accompanied Baumberg to the Spanish house, hurried up a walkway bordered by flourishing begonias, and stopped at a gated atrium entrance. Here they were in deep shadow. O'Hara was confident they wouldn't be spotted from the street.
A cold wind soughed in the branches of the benjaminas and rustled the shiny-leafed veronicas, and it seemed to O'Hara that the night itself was watching them with hostile intent. Could it be that some demonic entity had followed them and was with them now, at home in these shadows, an emissary of Satan, waiting to catch them off guard and tear them to pieces?
Mother Grace had said Satan would do anything he could to wreck their mission. Grace saw these things. Grace knew. Grace spoke the truth.
Grace was the truth.
His heart hammering, Pat O'Hara gazed blindly into the most impenetrable pockets of darkness, expecting to catch a glimpse of some lurking monstrosity. But he saw nothing out of the ordinary.
Baumberg stepped away from the wrought-iron atrium gate, onto the lawn, then into a planting bed filled with azaleas and dark-leafed begonias that, in the gloom, appeared to be utterly black. He peered in a window and said softly, "No drapes.
and I don't think there's any furniture, either."
O'Hara went to another window, put his face to the pane, squinted, and found the same signs of vacancy.
"Bingo," Baumberg said.
They had found what they were looking for.
At the side of the house, the entrance to the rear lawn was also gated, but that gate wasn't locked. As Baumberg pushed it open, the wrought-iron barrier squealed on unoiled hinges.
"I'll go back to the car and get the laundry bags," Baumberg said, and he slipped away through the night's black curtains.
O'Hara didn't think it was a good idea to split up, but Baumberg was gone before he could protest. Alone, it was more difficult to hold fear at bay, and fear was the food of the devil. Fear drew the Beast. O'Hara looked around at the throbbing darkness and told himself to remember that his faith was his armor. Nothing could harm him as long as he trusted the armor of his belief in Grace and God. But it wasn't easy.
Sometimes he longed for the days before his conversion, when he hadn't known about the approach of Twilight, when he hadn't realized that Satan was loose upon the earth and that the Antichrist had been born. He had been blissfully ignorant. The only things he had feared were cops, doing time in prison, and cancer because cancer had, killed his old man. Now he was afraid of everything between sunset and dawn, for it was in the dark hours that evil was boldest. These days, his life was shaped by fear, and at times the burden of Mother Grace's truth was almost too much to bear.
Still carrying the airline flight bag, O'Hara continued to the rear of the house, deciding not to wait for Baumberg. He'd show the devil that he was not intimidated.
Joey wanted to ride up front with Pete Lockburn, to whom he chattered ceaselessly and enthusiastically all the way home.
Christine sat in back with Charlie, who occasionally turned to look through the rear window. Frank Reuther followed in Christine's Pontiac Firebird, and a few cars back of Reuther, the white van continued to trail them, easily identified even at night because one of its headlights was slightly brighter than the other.
Charlie said, "I can't figure that guy out. Is he so dumb he thinks we don't notice him? Does he really think he's being discreet?"
"Maybe he doesn't care if we see him," Christine said." They seem so.
arrogant."
Charlie turned away from the rear window and sighed." You're probably right."
"What've you found out about the printing company-The True Word?"
Christine asked.
"Like I suspected, The True Word prints religious materialbooklets, pamphlets, tracts of all kinds. It's owned by the Church of the Twilight."
"Never heard of them," Christine said." Some crackpot cult?"
"As far as I'm concerned, yeah. Totally fruitcake."
"Mustn't be a big group, or I'd probably have heard of them."
"Not big, but rich," Charlie said." Maybe a thousand of them."
" Dangerous?"
"They haven't been involved in any big trouble. But the potential is there, the fanaticism. We've had a run-in with them on behalf of another client. About seven months ago. This guy's wife ran off, joined the cult, took their two kids with her-a three- and a four-year-old. These twilight weirdos wouldn't tell him where his wife was, wouldn't let him see his kids. The police weren't too much help.
Never are in these cases. Everyone's so worried about treading on religious liberties. Besides, the kids hadn't been kidnapped; they were with their mother. A mother can take her kids anywhere she pleases, as long as she's not violating a custody agreement in a divorce situation, which wasn't the case here. Anyway, we found the kids, snatched them away, returned them to the father. We couldn't do anything about the wife. She was staying with the cult voluntarily."
"They live communally? Like those people at Jonestown a few years ago?"
"Some of them do. Others have their own homes and apartments-but only if Mother Grace allows them that privilege."
" Who's Mother Grace'?"
He opened a briefcase, took an envelope and a penlight from it. He handed her the envelope, switched on the light, and said, "Have a look."
The envelope contained an eight-by-ten glossy. It was a picture of the old woman who had harassed them in the parking lot.
Even in a black-and-white photograph, even in two dimensions, the old woman's eyes were scary; there was a mad gleam in them. Christine shivered.
Along the back of the house were windows to the dining room, kitchen, breakfast nook, and family room. A pair of French doors led into the family room. O'Hara tried them, even though he was sure they'd be locked; they were.
The patio was bare. No flowerpots. No lawn furniture. The swimming pool had been drained, perhaps for repainting.
Standing by the French doors, O'Hara looked at the house to the north of this one. A six-foot cinder block wall separated this property from the next; therefore, he could see only the second story of that other house.
It was dark. To the south, beyond another wall, the second story of another house was visible, but this one was filled with light. At least no one was looking out any of the windows.
The rear of the property was walled, also, but the house in that direction was evidently a single-story model, for it couldn't be seen from the patio on which O'Hara stood.
He took a flashlight from the airline flight bag and used it to examine the panes of glass in the French doors and in one of the windows. He moved quickly, afraid of being seen. He was looking for wires, conductive alarm tape, and photo-electric cells-anything that would indicate the house was equipped with a burglar alarm. It was the kind of neighborhood where about a third of the houses would be wired. He found no indication that this place was part of that one-third.
He switched the flashlight off, fumbled in the flight bag, and withdrew a compact, battery-powered electronic device the size of a small transistor radio. An eighteen-inch length of wire extended from one end of it, terminating in a suction cup as large as the lid of a mayonnaise jar. He fixed the suction cup to a pane in one of the French doors.