Studying the computer monitor in my home office, I saw that Sand Mansion Investments was a legal shell company comprising the six known associates of Reggie Atlas, but also of Ronald White, aka Reggie Atlas, and Mary Lavoy, aka Marie Knippermeir, heir to the Knippermeir Breakfast Meats fortune and wife of the hatemonger Alfred Battle.
I felt my pulse jump when I saw that one of the Sand Mansion REIT properties on the Bay of Dreams in Baja California was Casa de Angeles Caídos. House of Fallen Angels.
I’d fished the Bay of Dreams. A beautiful bay and a rich fishery. For decades it was known as Bahía Muertos — Bay of Death — because of the hundreds of head of cattle that had died there in a hurricane. More recent developers changed the name for obvious reasons, and the former Bay of Death was one of the most ruggedly beautiful places I’d ever seen. Like the Middle East, lower Baja California has an almost otherworldly beauty where the desert meets the sea. The coast is dotted with mansions, some merely spectacular and others competitively outdoing their neighbors. Sprawling estates painted in bright colors, mostly. Extravagant properties.
House of Fallen Angels was a ten-acre, ten-thousand-square-foot compound overlooking the Bay of Dreams. A main house and two guest houses, all painted white, with blue domes that appeared — on the House of Fallen Angel’s rental website — to be made of lapis-blue tiles. The windows were trimmed in red. A wide slope of green grass. Palms, neatly coiffed. Three crosses towered above it all, high in a pale blue sky. A helipad, landing strip, two swimming pools. All offered by the month, domestic and landscape staff included, for fifty thousand USD, serious inquiries only.
So Reggie had gotten his mansion, I thought. Bought it in partnership with a storied white supremacist’s breakfast-meat fortune, remodeled it to his own fantasy specs, and offset the costs by renting it to the wealthy when he wasn’t using it himself.
Not bad for the rookie Georgia evangelical who’d almost had his career beaten out of him by three black men but was rescued by an angel disguised as an old man, white hair combed back, blue eyes in a haunted face. A pastor who had mixed himself up with an eighth-grade girl who admittedly had a crush on him. And had unleashed his powers of seduction upon her. Although it could very well have been the other way around. Or some of each.
I took the virtual tour of the House of Fallen Angels. Mexican/Spanish/Moorish architecture. Hard to say where one style ended and another began. High windows and sunlight. Heavy wooden furniture. Blue-and-yellow tile mosaics framing the doors. Mahogany window frames. Bold paintings on white walls, elegant ceramics on pedestals, each one singled out by the gallery spotlights. Christs and Madonnas and saints and martyrs of all sizes and postures and materials, from the bloody to the beatific. But mostly angels. Angels everywhere, in paintings and stained glass, as sculpture, as wall sconces and freestanding figures, as candles and dolls, in metals and wood and wax and glass.
Twelve beautiful children would appear... and our family would become the foundation of the lost tribe of Israel...
And here in the House of Fallen Angels — I had to figure — was where the rest of those beautiful children were to be conceived. According to the gospel of Penelope. Based on sayings attributed to Reggie Atlas. One down. Eleven to go. And, if they were not to be born of the fallen child-angel Penelope, then why not by her daughter? His daughter?
I remembered his words the Sunday morning I’d met him in his office: The young are our future, Mr. Ford. They will multiply us into heaven.
From the far side of my spacious oak desk, wasp-cam one from Paradise Date Farm jumped to life on Dale Clevenger’s heavy red laptop. I watched Connor Donald striding from the main house toward the large, corrugated metal hangar. Evening by then, the school closed and most of the cars gone. Orange desert light, dust puffing with each fall of his duty boots.
Wasp-cam three picked him up, unlocking the convenience door to the hangar. A moment later the rolling door came up, revealing the dusty ATVs and the shiny John Deeres and the two long work benches behind them. I saw that the hand tools had been moved since I’d first seen them a few days back. The cans of nuts and bolts, too, and the soldering guns. Elves at work, I thought, making presents for Christmas. Just three months away, and all those millions to provide for.
Connor Donald weaved through the vehicles and past the work benches, then stopped outside the perforated steel security door near the back of the building. He pulled a key ring from his pants pocket, unlocked the door, and pushed it open.
He stepped in and turned on a light and I finally got a look inside. A long stainless-steel table ran almost wall-to-wall in the back, upon which sat a large glove box roughly the size and shape of a coffin. The glove box was clear acrylic or glass, and had two sets of articulating arms on the side facing me. A rolling backless stool for each work station. I could see heavy-looking black hands — somehow both mechanical and human — at rest within the box. There were latches and lock pins at both ends, for loading and unloading from either direction.
Connor Donald walked around the table to the other side and returned with a handheld monitor of some kind, set it on the table near the glove box.
Arranged neatly on the table in front of him, on either side of the long glove box, I saw a flotilla of smaller box-shaped meters with read-out windows — some plugged in to surge protectors and others apparently battery-powered, some with handles and some without; handheld devices the size of large smartphones; handheld devices shaped like a cross between a pistol and a caulking gun; an assortment of what appeared to be tiny loudspeakers in miniature cabinets, no bigger than travel alarm clocks. Plenty of wires, narrow-gauge cable, and the flexible coiled extension cord once found on telephones.
Electrical diagnostic and measuring equipment? Maybe. Hazmat — chemical or biological? Maybe. But what of the pistol — caulking gun contraptions and the small loudspeakers attached to some of the meters? My next thought was radioactive devices. Not voltmeters but radiation dosimeters and radiometers? Not oscilloscopes but radiation detectors?
Burt barreled in, holding up his phone for me to see.
“They’re working with radioactive material,” he said. “The fume hood.”
At Burt’s prompt I saw it, suspended from the ceiling over the work table, just visible at the top of Clevenger’s laptop screen. For drawing up radioactive particles or gases suspended in the air, invisible, odorless, and potentially lethal. In my attention to Connor Donald, and the puzzling glove box and various gauges and meters, I hadn’t registered it.
Wasp-cam one came online, Eric Glassen crossing the dusty farm yard. Camera three picked him up as he entered the hangar and worked his way through the vehicles toward the lab. He moved quickly and lightly, like the athlete he had been in high school. A cornerback, requiring speed, strength, and the ability to hit an opponent — often a very strong running back — at high velocity. With his thick neck and pit-bull ears, Eric was a formidable-looking man. I remembered his brief and disappointing UFC career. And his odd choice of UC Riverside undergraduate degrees in mechanical engineering and history.