“No. I don’t think so,” I said with a sigh. I unplugged the iron. One step forward, two steps back. I reached into my wallet and dug out eighty dollars. “Hey, take this for your phone, Dante. I can give you more if you need it. I’m really sorry about that.”
He took another bite of his burger, eyed the money for a moment, and then accepted it. “That should be good. I’ll swing by and get me one on the way home. Thanks.”
“Yeah.”
He was still looking at the towels and shower curtain. “Any new leads on the case?”
“Maybe,” I said. “I’ll keep you posted.” Then I glanced down at the floor. “I guess I should put this stuff away. I’ll talk to you later.”
He stared at the iron for another moment or two before he turned. “Yeah, OK. See that you do.” Then he left, taking another bite out of his supper.
As I began cleaning up, I noticed something on the carpet glimmering in the light.
I knelt beside it. A lapel pin of a Confederate flag.
Just like the one the governor was wearing.
Must have pulled off Trembley’s shirt when I made him lie on the floor.
I decided it was time to listen to those phone transcripts and see what Bethanie had to say about Governor Sebastian Taylor.
51
Once inside the federal building I didn’t waste any time locating the transcripts of Bethanie’s calls to Governor Taylor’s office. As I read through them I realized she was clearly terrified but also afraid to give specifics. Maybe she was worried someone was listening in.
“Tell him the boy remembers. Tell him the boy is coming,” she said over and over. “You have to tell him!”
“The boy remembers,” I whispered.
Trembley had said the cult leader in New Mexico claimed to be a Jonestown survivor. Was he “the boy”? Terry had said Governor Taylor was a CIA agent stationed in Guyana at the time of the tragedy. Was this cult guy after the governor?
I flipped open my computer to try and figure out what “college” Bethanie and Alexis had attended in New Mexico.
An hour later it was pitch black outside, and I was still searching, still coming up with nothing. I heard some footsteps and looked up. Ralph and Lien-hua walked in toting takeout boxes of Chinese food. “It’s the best Chinese food in Asheville,” Lien-hua was telling him. “Which isn’t saying much.”
Ralph stopped abruptly when he saw me. “What are you doing here, Pat? Aren’t you supposed to be picking up your daughter from the airport?”
“Her flight was delayed,” I said. “Comes in tomorrow morning. Remember when I was followed earlier today?”
Ralph set down his food. “Yeah. So you know who it was?”
“Yeah. Mind if I join you? I’m starved.”
In between bites of General Tso’s chicken and beef chow fun, I filled them in on what Trembley had told me at the hotel and what Terry had told me on the phone.
“Jonestown, the governor, the murders, they’re all connected…?” said Ralph.
“Looks like it,” I said. “I read through the transcripts of Bethanie’s phone calls. She was afraid for her life. And according to the case files, one of the women in Alexis’s apartment complex thought she was acting nervous in the days preceding her death.”
Lien-hua used chopsticks like an artist uses a brush. “So you’re thinking maybe this cult leader in New Mexico is planning something against the governor, and when Bethanie and Alexis caught wind of it and tried to leave and warn Governor Taylor, this man, the Father, had them killed?”
I nodded. The theory explained a lot about the location and timing of the murders but still left some major questions unanswered. “I’ll admit it’s a work in progress.”
“How did the Father find out the details from the case files?” asked Ralph. “Location of the stab wounds, type of rope, stuff like that?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. Some of it was made public, but not all of it.”
“But why go through all the trouble of staging a crime to make it look like a serial killer did it?” asked Ralph. “Why not just kill them and then dispose of the bodies?”
“Bethanie’s family was already suspicious,” I said. “That’s why they’d hired Trembley in the first place. If she suddenly disappeared, it would have brought even more suspicion on the group, maybe even put an end to their plans.”
“So what do we know about this cult leader?” asked Lien-hua.
“Almost nothing so far. I’ve been trying to find stuff on the Internet, but I’ve come up dry. It’s like he’s a ghost.” I sighed. “I even tried contacting Bethanie’s family, but they’re not returning any of my calls. They might be in hiding. I guess if we had a little more info on Jonestown it might help us see where all these stories intersect.”
Lien-hua’s eyes lit up. “I thought you’d never ask.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I researched group dynamics and cult behavior for my master’s degree, spent a couple months studying Peoples Temple.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“Nope. I even had to write up a profile on the Reverend Jim Jones.”
“I can give you his profile in one word,” said Ralph. “Wacko.” He took a bite of chicken.
“If we do not learn from the past-” she started to say.
“I know, I know,” he said. “We’re destined to drink cyanide all over again.”
Lien-hua set down her chopsticks. “You know, there’s a lot about that whole incident most people don’t know.”
“Let’s see,” grunted Ralph, “vats of Kool-Aid laced with a mixture of potassium cyanide and tranquilizers. I think there were about nine-hundred people there. They’d practiced the whole group suicide thing before. Lined up, drank it, died in the jungle. That about sums it up.” He went back to his food.
“Nope, nope, and nope.”
“What?” His mouth was full. “What do you mean?”
“The first one’s just a technicality-it was Flavor-Aid, not Kool-Aid. Secondly, there were no drills, at least not according to the survivors. And third, while it’s true that some of the people did drink the poison, many, if not most, of them were murdered-”
“What!” I said.
She nodded. “Some were injected with cyanide, some were strangled, some died from gunshot wounds, others from crossbow bolts.”
Ralph and I exchanged glances. “I thought they all drank it,” I said. “Mass suicide.”
“Babies don’t commit suicide, Pat. Of the 909 who died, nearly 300 were children, another 200 were elderly. Some people were asleep when they were injected. That’s not suicide. The babies had cyanide squirted down their throats by their parents.”
Just the thought made me physically ill. “I had no idea.”
“That’s what I mean; most people don’t know the whole story.” I pushed my plate away. I’d lost my appetite.
Ralph took a bite of beef chow fun. Nothing seemed to faze him. “All right,” he said. “So fill us in.”
“Well… the Reverend Jim Jones founded Peoples Temple as a mainline Protestant church in the 1950s. They did a lot of social work, crossed over racial lines, attracted lots of minorities, which of course made him popular with the city council of San Francisco. Eventually, though, he stopped teaching about God and drifted into teaching a mixture of pseudo-communism and socialism-of course, he only preached those sermons when the city officials weren’t present.”
“Of course,” Ralph said.
“I knew he was a pastor,” I said, “but I didn’t know he was a communist.”
“Well, he talked like he was, but for him nearly everything he said was to manipulate others. It’s hard to say what he really believed. After a while the political tide began to change-lawsuits, allegations of human rights abuse. Jones was even arrested for lewd behavior with another man.”
She nibbled at her chicken and then took a sip of bottled water. “Anyway,” she continued, “he was paranoid and convinced nuclear war was imminent-also wanted to avoid the lawsuits. He’d researched the best places to live in case of nuclear war and decided on Guyana, South America. Eventually, he and his group moved down there to set up an agricultural project.”