heâs one nasty motherfucker.â
âIâm afraid you lost me with the technical jargon there, doc.â
She actually smiled. Score one for the team.
âCare to elaborate?â
âWell, like most cult leaders, Sethâs past is mysterious.â
âBecause he lies about it, you mean. Better your followers donât know you spent ten years shampooing carpets before becoming the Chosen One.â
âThatâs usually the case, yes. But Seth is genuinely impossible to trace. No tax records, no birth certificate, no social. He claims to have âwalked out of the desertâ twenty years agoââ
âNot hard to believe, around here. Half of what I deal with on a daily basis is people walking out of the damn desert.â
ââafter wandering for forty years, like the ancient Hebrews.â
âOkay, yeah, thatâs different.â
âOh, and he says heâs descended from the high priest of an ancient god. Whoâs going to pass his powers down to Seth, bringing an end to the world as we know it.â
âSounds like pretty standard stuffâa little from column A, little from column B. Where do the girls come in?â
âIâve never gotten close enough to find that out. Melinda Richards was my best source, but sheâd only heard rumors. I know he recruits families with young daughters. By the time the girls disappear, theyâve been off the grid for years.â
âAnd you believe heâs killing them.â
âNo, I think heâs trafficking them. Telling their parents theyâve gone off on some kind of missionary trip, then selling them into sexual slavery.â Cantwellâs jaw tightened, as if she were grinding her teeth. âForget about luxury cars and villas and all that. The new status symbol, if youâre a Mexican drug lord, is a harem of virgin girls.â
âI didnât know that,â Nichols said evenly, wondering where she was getting this stuff.
âGiven the choice, Sheriff? Iâd rather be dead.â
The sheriff glanced over his shoulder, at the shotgun lying in the backseat. âIf youâre right about any of this, Sethâs compound will be heavily fortified. What do you think weâre gonna do, just stroll up to the front door, ring the bell?â
Cantwellâs eyes burned up the road. The Audiâs speedometer edged past ninety.
âThe one solid piece of information I got from Melinda is that before the girls disappeared, they were removed from the living quarters and brought to an old barn, far from everything else. She was terrified of that placeâof her daughter ending up there. Itâs how I finally convinced her to get out. And unless I miss my guess, thatâs exactly where Sherry is right now.â
A ARON S ETHâS B UICK rolled slowly up the rutted road and came to a stop before the compoundâs meetinghouse. He shut the door without a sound and ran a hand over his thinning brown hair, carefully parted and meticulously combed.
He was a slight man, neatly attired in khakis, a white shirt, and a blue blazer adorned with an American flag lapel pin. At first glance, his most notable feature was a lack of notable featuresâan overall plainness so pronounced that the eyes slid right off him, made a second glance seem like a waste of time.
It was an impression he had spent years cultivating.
If one looked longer, one might notice some other things. That he never seemed to sweat, for instanceâas if the brutal afternoon sun beat down on everything but him. Or that he possessed a strength and quickness remarkable for his age.
Whatever age that was. For the longer one looked at Aaron Seth, the less it became possible to say, with any degree of certainty. He might have been seventy and exceptionally spry, or forty and formerly hard-living.
Seth could not have said himself. His memories of childhood were blurred and distant, a
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