The Prophet (Ryan Archer #2) (11 page)

“Did she pay her own phone bill?”

“I took care of it. I took care of everything for her.”

“Do you pay for a plan through a major carrier?”

“Yeah, we both used Sprint.”

“Can you manage your account online?”

Glen nodded. “Yup.”

“Do you have a computer here you can log on to?”

“Sure, my laptop is on the coffee table downstairs.”

Archer followed him down the stairs. Glen flopped down in a recliner made of low quality, shiny leather, and propped his feet up on the coffee table. There were two ashtrays on the coffee table and a stack of magazines Archer didn’t recognize. A big flat-screen television was on with the volume down. A show was on—forgettable people making fools of themselves. The laptop was plastered with stickers and Archer could hear the hard drive churn as Glen opened a web browser window and keyed in the URL link for his service provider.

“Pull up the last few weeks of Cecile’s call activity,” Archer said.

Glen nodded as he typed. He sipped from a can of Diet Coke. He had blond hair and a small birthmark beneath one eye. He had narrow shoulders and his collarbone was prominent against the pale flesh above his chest. One solid punch would leave a guy like that flattened and comatose, Archer figured. Again, what had Cecile seen in him aside from a little walking around money and all the free pot she could smoke?

Glen pursed his lips and tapped the track pad, then turned the laptop so that Archer could see the screen.

“Here’s all her calls for this billing period. You can scroll back and forth however you like,” Glen said.

“Any numbers you don’t recognize?” Archer asked.

Glen wrinkled his upper lip. “I wouldn’t recognize any of them. We didn’t share friends, man.”

“I want you to page through her incoming and outgoing calls from the past few weeks and tell me if anything stands out to you, anything unusual,” Archer said.

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. You’ll know it when you see it.”

Glen frowned. “There’s a lot of numbers here, man.” The hair was mashed down on one side of his head where he’d been asleep.

“Pour some coffee and get to work. Shouldn’t take you more than ten minutes.”

Archer walked into the kitchen and sat on a barstool, resting his forearms on the countertop that looked out on the living room where Glen was hard at work and a couple of attractive but vapid twenty-somethings were enmeshed in some deep drama on TV. He snapped the rubber bands back around the roll of hundreds and placed the cash in the center of the counter. He stared at it.

It seemed like a lot of cash for a young woman with no job and no other known source of income other than whatever expenses Glen had helped her with. Where had she gotten it? Archer quickly ruled out her mother. Ms. Espinoza hadn’t looked like she might have that kind of cash to spare. She was divorced and working as a paralegal, pulling down maybe forty a year. So she wouldn’t have been doling out fifty-five hundred bucks to a daughter she rarely saw or spoke to.
 

So where had the money come from?

Archer went back upstairs to the bedroom Glen had shared with his bride-to-be. The plastic sandwich baggie was still on the dresser. He used the tail of his T-shirt to fold it down to the size of a saltine cracker and shoved it into the back pocket of his jeans. He paused in the doorway and stared in at the bed. His stomach cringed again as he pondered whether it had ever been properly made. It was a queen, with two pillows, powder blue sheets, and a light comforter with a southwestern design printed on one side. One of the pillows had a fresh indention. The other was slightly askew. Archer deduced that the indention was from Glen’s recently interrupted slumber and the other was askew because Cecile hadn’t been home.

Archer returned to the kitchen and Glen was pouring juice into a glass with the door to the refrigerator standing open. The roll of cash was where he’d left it. Glen pushed the door shut and added a shot of vodka to his juice.
 

“What happened to my coffee suggestion?” Archer asked, eyeballing the orange juice.

Glen shrugged. “To each his own,” he said. “Besides, I earned this little treat.”

“How so?”

There was a yellow Post-it note stuck to the edge of the countertop. Glen flicked at it with his finger as he walked by.
 

“That phone number seemed strangely out of place to me, and I found three occurrences this month. Cecile had dialed it twice, and received one call from that number early this week. She had called it a day before she disappeared,” Glen said.

Archer peeled the note from the Formica surface and studied the ten digits. It had a 385 area code.

“I Googled the area code,” Glen said. “It’s a Salt Lake City area code, if you care at all.”

Salt Lake City. Something pinged in Archer’s brain. He remembered the Mercedes with the plates Webb had traced to a warehouse in Salt Lake City. Archer didn’t believe in coincidences.

“You going to call it?” Glen asked.

“Not here and not now,” Archer said. “Forget about it and go back to bed. You look like shit. Don’t talk to anyone about this.”

Glen swallowed the last of the orange juice in his glass.

“No problem,” Glen said.

“Do yourself a favor and cut back on the weed, brother,” Archer said on his way out the door.
 

“Done and done,” Glen said with a grin.

Cecile could have done much better, Archer thought as he backed out of the driveway and turned into the street.
 

SEVENTEEN

Gravel crunched under the tires as Archer pulled the Land Cruiser onto the shoulder of the road above Smith’s house. He took a long drink from a bottle of water before getting out and swinging the door shut. He leaned against the truck for a moment, gazing back down the hill. Smith’s house was visible where the road twisted. A breeze washed across his face and he appreciated it. It had turned into another hot day. He could feel sweat on his back sticking to his shirt. He reached in for the water bottle and removed the cap. Another long drink. It was warm enough out and the sun was relentless enough that he decided to carry the water bottle with him as he looked around.
 

The gentlemen from the black Mercedes were occupying his mind. Who were they and what did they want? He had spotted them following him the previous day and then they had apparently staked out Smith’s house, knowing he was there. They had parked right here where he was standing and watched the house. What had they planned? What were they watching for? He let these questions and a few others tumble through his brain.

He stepped around to the rear of his truck and squatted near the gravel at his feet. He picked up a couple of chalky gray rocks, skipping them one at a time across the narrow asphalt lane to his left. The sun was positioned above the trees at a perfect angle to be shining directly into his eyes as he stared downhill toward Smith’s house.

His eyes dropped to the gravel shoulder and the black tire marks left by the Mercedes when it peeled out that morning. He tracked the car’s movement in his mind, syncing the recorded action to the physical evidence left behind that he could observe and study.
 

A wink of light caught his attention from the corner of his eye. He turned his head. A small object in the road had caught the sun. Archer rose from the squat and walked over. He straddled the tread marks left by the Mercedes and hitched both hands on his hips. Stared straight down. The object that had captured his attention was a copper shell casing. He squatted again and used the tail of his shirt to retrieve the shell casing. The tail of his shirt prevented contaminating the evidence with his fingerprints.
 

He put the truck in gear and turned into Smith’s driveway.

She wasn’t home. She would be at work. Archer imagined her in her studio in her tight yoga pants, bending and posing, inhaling, exhaling, leading a class of fit and tanned women in front of floor-to-ceiling mirrors. It was a pleasant thought. He was very pleased to have her in his life and to share a bed with her. He was very fond of Smith. He went inside long enough to get another bottle of water from the refrigerator and use the restroom. From a drawer in the kitchen he found a box of business envelopes and took one. Smith had left a note for him on the kitchen counter, signed XOXO. He was suddenly looking forward to their next late night shower together.

* * *

Alexander had given Tatum new clothes. This was slightly distressing because he had taken her hooded sweatshirt and hadn’t explained why and she was hesitant to ask. The most distressing part was that the new shirt didn’t have a hood at all, so she couldn’t reflexively cover her head the way she had grown so accustomed to ever since she was a small girl. It was stressful feeling so exposed at all times. She didn’t know how to cope.

Another change she wasn’t coping with well was the shift they had made to her daily schedule. She was used to staying up late into the night and then sleeping until midday. But now they had her rising early and going to bed well before midnight. The change in hours actually made her feel healthy but had also turned her into a nervous wreck.
All that terrible sunshine out there
. The result was a new habit of scratching nervously at her forearms and neck. The daylight hours made her feel like she was inside a prison of her own skin.

Alexander had told her he would be away today on business. She was free to roam the halls of the church as long as she didn’t go into any rooms with closed doors.
 

“Explore,” he had said. “Enjoy yourself. You’ve worked very hard. I’m so very proud of the tremendous progress you’re making!”

It put butterflies in her stomach when he praised her. She wanted so desperately to make Alexander proud. Her crush on him had intensified with every hour they spent alone together, and she continued to fantasize about kissing his mouth, feeling his soft lips pressed against hers. Sometimes she felt dizzy she wanted him to kiss her so badly. But that would never happen and she chastised herself for entertaining such silly delusions. After all, Alexander was a grown man and she was only fifteen years old.
 

The main hall was enormous and awe-inspiring, with a vaulted ceiling that seemed to reach the sky. The ceiling of the main hall was covered in paintings depicting random religious symbolism, and Tatum found herself walking slowly, head tilted back to its limit, lost in the mesmerizing tapestries far above her. It was like gazing into heaven. Tatum had read many books and spent time online learning about famous religious places like the Vatican in Rome. This church very much reminded her of the photographs she had seen of those places. All the art and artifacts—paintings, sculptures, spiritual symbols and the startling amount of gold and silver and jewels inlaid into everything around her. Strolling the halls was both exhilarating and intimidating.

She ran her hand across the polished surface of a long mahogany table, humming a favorite song, smiling to herself as she followed her shadow creeping ahead of her on the elaborate parquet floor. The hallway branched to the right. Her thoughts had drifted and she felt content for the first time in a long time. Most of the doors inside the church were closed and she remembered what Alexander had said about closed doors. She had no intention of breaking Alexander’s rule.

She felt a cool sensation pass through her. She stopped and looked up. Silas was standing in the hallway ahead of her. He was staring directly at her. No smile on his face. No expression at all. She reached for her hood but it wasn’t there. Her first impulse was to hide. She suddenly felt very scared.
 

* * *

The original structure where the Church of the Narrow Gate was built had been a Spanish mission where an old priest lived alone, faithfully serving God until he died penniless and childless at the ripe old age of ninety-three. It had been a stucco dwelling with a tiny bedroom and a wood-frame bed. The priest had established the mission in 1810. The thirty acres of land was donated by a farmer who himself was a pious man and faithful churchgoer. At that time the land had been virtually worthless. Now its value was in the multiple millions of dollars. The stucco mission had been expanded upon over the decades before falling into disrepair due to neglect. It was largely ignored by the Catholic Church for the better part of a hundred years until a wealthy man from the East Coast paid twenty thousand dollars for the thirty acres in 1913. It seemed like all the money in the world and they sold it without a second thought.

The man’s name was Claymore and he was old and crippled by the time he moved from New Jersey to California. He had made and lost several great fortunes in shipping, and had come to the land of sunshine to build a castle where he could die. He oversaw construction until his death, where upon his seventh wife took over his estate. She was a gold digger with other plans. She fired the architect and brought in someone one else who would listen to her demands. Construction took two years. When she died (thrown from a horse), the estate was passed to her daughter, and then to her granddaughter, an adventurous, eccentric girl named Bella. Bella believed in ghosts and angels and heard voices talking to her at night when she was alone. She was committed to psychiatric care numerous times in her teens and twenties but had threatened to sue the hospitals if they did not release her, or cut family from her will if they did not leave her alone.

It was Bella, in her thirties, who met Silas Sawbridge and fell under his spell. She pledged her life and her fortune to him, eventually donating the castle and the thirty acres to his newly formed church. Bella’s body was found floating in the water in Malibu six months after the title transfer papers had been signed. For a few years an oil painting of her hung in the grand entry hall of the church, honoring her memory, but then it quietly disappeared and her role in the advancement of Silas’s ministry was soon forgotten.

The castle was the headquarters of the Church of the Narrow Gate. The exterior had remained unchanged for over a hundred years, and still reflected Claymore’s original grand vision. It was the basement level where the church’s offices were located that had been most updated to meet the needs of the present age.