“And you were kidnapped by the cult before and escaped?”
Gary nodded.
“That’s rare,” the deputy said.
“What happened?” the sheriff asked. “Your detective didn’t give me too many details.”
Gary explained how he’d been abducted from his dorm room, drugged, and taken to a farmhouse in New Mexico. He described how, after spending a day there shackled to the floor, he’d escaped following a car crash, and revealed his suspicion that the De Baca sheriff was one of them.
Stewart looked over at his deputy before turning back toward Gary. “Would you be willing to testify that the Homesteaders were the ones who did this to you?”
“Hell, yeah!” Brian answered for him.
Gary nodded.
The sheriff smiled. “That would help us out a lot.”
“Does that mean that now you can go in there and rescue Joan?” Stacy asked.
Stewart sighed. “It’s not that easy. I don’t know how much you know about the Homesteaders, but they’re a cult. They brainwash people. It’s virtually impossible for us to get anyone to testify against them or go on record in any way, shape or form.”
“They’re scared,” the deputy said.
The sheriff nodded. “Even the ones who have escaped, who know things, who’ve seen things, are afraid. As you found out, these sons of bitches have a long reach. And right now, we’re not allowed to even look in their direction, thanks to a court order.”
“That they bought,” the deputy added.
“They have some pull in these parts,” Stewart admitted.
“Well, we’re going over there and getting Joan,” Gary said. “Even if we have to tear that place down.”
“We don’t condone what you’re doing,” the sheriff said. “In fact, we aren’t even aware that you’re doing it. But if you get into trouble and need help, it’s possible that we might be nearby.”
“With enough men to storm those gates in sixty seconds flat,” the deputy offered.
“Thank you,” Stacy told them.
Stewart sat down behind his desk. “Just do us a favor. Wait until morning.”
Gary started to object, but the sheriff said, “It’s only another hour or so. Besides, it’s dark now; you’ll be at a disadvantage. And while I have a man out in… that general vicinity right now, I won’t have my full shift coming on duty until seven.”
“We’ll wait,” Stacy promised.
Gary looked at her.
“Come on. We need every advantage we can get. Besides, we still don’t even have a plan.”
“What do we do until then?” Brian wondered.
“We have a break room,” the deputy said. “There’s coffee, some old cookies, I think. You could just wait there.”
“Tell us more about this cult,” Reyn suggested. “Give us a heads-up on what we should do, what we should be looking for.”
Brian raised his hand. “I have a question. On our way here, we saw these cult guys just walking along the highway. For miles. What’s that about?”
“Penitents,” the sheriff said. “They’re members of the cult who have been sent away to live elsewhere. For punishment. After a certain amount of time, they’re allowed to return. Homesteaders don’t just live here in Bitterweed, in the place they call the Home. This is where they come for training or indoctrination or whatever, and a lot of them do stay, but some of them live in other places, other states.” He gestured toward Gary. “As you found out.”
Gary nodded. “Like the people at that farmhouse.”
“We think they do it on purpose, so we won’t know how many of them there actually are—and so that, even if we raid the Home and capture everyone in it, they’ll still have people free. We don’t even know where these penitents go when they leave Bitterweed. I mean, we’ve followed some of them, and we do know a few locations, here in Texas, but out there… ?” Stewart shook his head.
“Speaking of raids,” Reyn said, “what exactly did you go after them on? And what’s with this harassment case?”
Stewart sighed. “We first went after them four years ago. A woman came to us, claiming that she’d been raped and held captive against her will.”
Gary felt cold.
“At that point, we knew of the Homesteaders—they used to come into town for groceries and gas, supplies and whatnot—but as far as we were concerned, they were just a bunch of religious wackos, neohippie survivalists who kept to themselves and did no harm.”
“They’ve been there forever,” Hubbard added. “My dad remembers the Homesteaders being there when he was a kid.”
“But they hadn’t had much to do with outsiders and no one really gave them much thought. Then this woman escaped, she said, from captivity, and claimed that she’d been imprisoned in the Home for over a year and repeatedly raped by the leader of the cult, who she called ‘Father.’ We immediately obtained a warrant, but before we could serve it and arrest this ‘Father,’ our victim had a change of heart—”
“They got to her,” Hubbard said angrily.
The sheriff nodded. “They got to her. I don’t know how, although I assume it happened in the hospital in Fort Albin, where she was being examined for evidence of rape, but all of a sudden we got a call and it was her, and she was desperate to drop all charges—”
“Scared,” Hubbard said.
“She was scared,” Stewart agreed. He ran a hand along the back of his neck. “I chose to continue, figuring we had a case even without her cooperation, figuring we could get her cooperation back once we showed her how strong the case was…” He trailed off.
“What happened?” Gary prodded.
“She threw herself down a flight of stairs.”
“Or was thrown,” Hubbard said.
“There was no proof. We couldn’t prove anything, either way. I arrested this ‘Father,’ who, no surprise, refused to give us his real name. We checked his prints, but they weren’t on file anywhere, and we could find no way to positively ID him. He was not in any system, and we could find no one willing to vouch for his identity. Our guess is that he was born in the Home and has lived there all of his life, but on the complaint we were forced to refer to him as ‘John Doe,’ as crazy as that sounds.
“I asked the DA to prosecute based on the victim’s initial statement, but the case was kicked the second it went before a judge. ‘Father’ was already free, anyway. He had a high-powered lawyer who got him out of jail after the first night.”
“Wow,” Stacy said.
“Yeah. Anyway, next time around, it was a boy who claimed he was drugged and kidnapped, a student from College Station whose mother, after the death of her husband, had sold everything she owned and become a member of the cult. The boy had been concerned about her, had started making inquiries, and one day he’d come home to his apartment to find two men waiting for him. They drugged him, abducted him and brought him to the Home.”
“That sounds familiar,” Reyn said, looking at Gary.
“He was a smart kid. Resourceful. And big. Played fullback for the Aggies. He managed to fight his way free, and after he got out of the Home came directly to us, told us everything. So we got a warrant and raided the place, but someone must have tipped them off because we went over those buildings with a fine-toothed comb and found no drugs whatsoever, no indication that anyone had ever been held there against their will.”
Gary looked at Reyn. “You’re right. Déjà vu all over again.”
“We had dogs, and even they couldn’t sniff anything out. The Homesteaders, of course, were as polite as you please, very helpful, pulling that deferential religious act. We interviewed anyone we could find, but they all toed the party line, claimed they’d never seen the kid before. And we couldn’t find that many people. It was like everyone had taken off or was hiding somewhere. We searched the compound anyway, took a lot of pictures, and we did see some weird things: no bathrooms, a kitchen where a cook was butchering a possum, a chapel filled with the strangest-looking worshippers I’ve ever seen, a round room filled with homemade coffins, a triangular room where women were cutting big sheets of paper into little rectangles, huge pictures of our old buddy ‘Father’ everywhere you looked. But nothing illegal and nothing that was specified in the warrant.