Page 42 of Shadow of Death
“Are you at headquarters? Andy told me you were with Brian.”
“No, we’re not at headquarters. Yes, I am with Brian.”
And that was why he was speaking so carefully.
“I just saw Peggy Johnston,” Amy said. “You can tell Brian his mother is going to make a full recovery. She’ll just need a little time.”
“Thank God,” Hunter murmured. She heard him talking to the boy. “This is my friend, Amy. She’s at the hospital. She saw your mom. She’s going to be fine when she’s had a bit of a chance to recover.”
Amy heard a soft sob, and Hunter was quiet for a minute. She winced and worried about the connection he must have been feeling with Brian Johnston.
She knew when he was a child Hunter had come upon the body of a woman who had questioned the head of a cult. He had to feel Brian’s pain.
“Hunter? I’m going to head back in now. I have a little information. Apparently, that cliff was theirchurch. Peggy didn’t know anything about Mateus or Martin—other than when they had met, they had both seemed to offer nothing but love and kindness toward others.”
“Heard that story before,” Hunter murmured. “Anyway, agents have corralled several of the participants in today’s almost-sacrifice. We’ll get something from someone.”
“Right. So—why aren’t you back at the office?”
“Because Brian is helping me explore the area.”
“I see.” She didn’t really see at all.
“Brian is helping me. He thinks he may know where they might have hidden Mateus. The, uh, man you shot who was going to kill the girl.”
“Oh,” she said. She still didn’t really see. How might the boy know? Of course, she knew she had killed the man.
And his body had disappeared.
“We’re looking for his body,” he said very quietly. “We’ll head straight back when we leave here,” Hunter told her.
“Right. Of course. All right, I’m going in now, so I’ll be there.”
He didn’t reply. Amy thought she had lost the connection. She frowned, and said, “Hunter?”
He was still there. When he spoke, his voice was taut and his words were hard.
“Amy, I’ll call you back. I think we might have found a body. In fact, I’m afraid we might have found several bodies.”
8
How the hell long had these killers been at it? Was there one leader jerking around the rest, or were several people handling the puppet strings of mind manipulation to kill, then disposing of some bodies in mud pits and others here—deep in a crevice of the cliffs where it was going to be a master engineering feat for medical examiners to begin to evaluate the dead?
Hunter drew Brian away from the crevice in the cliff as quickly as he could. He looked at the boy’s face and saw he appeared to be in shock.
“Were you here before, Brian?” he asked.
Brian shook his head, pointing back toward the path. “My dad pointed over here...saying it was where God would recover those who had been helped. And I figured that...if God would find souls there, then...”
He turned away, falling to his knees on the ground, his hands on his face. He was sobbing. “I swear, they’re not bad! My parents aren’t bad people. They...they’re...not bad!”
They weren’t necessarily bad people. Hunter knew far too many truly decent human beings who had fallen into cults, into a manner of mind control. First, a leader just needed to seek out the disenfranchised, those feeling a little lost by casual cruelty found in society. Friendship, love, and kindness were all offered. Equality was a given. Then bit by bit, it became obvious the love was offered with greater fervor to those who worked the hardest, who shouted the leader’s name the loudest, who obeyed without question. For those who dared to disagree...
Jonestown. One example of what could happen.
And here...this. Not the death of cult members, per se. Unless they chose to leave or disobey, Hunter imagined. Or maybe, in the end, all were intended to die in a strange pact before the “End of Days” fell upon them. Convincing others to murder on such a scale as a way to save the souls of sinners was beyond heinous.
He set his arm around Brian. The Voltaire quote kept ceaselessly running through his mind.
