White Heat

Without even looking inside the box, she dropped it in her satchel.

“Don’t you think you should see if it fits? You’ll have to wear it tomorrow.”

Feeling as though a vise was squeezing her chest, she dug out the box and peered inside.

The diamond was tiny, the band plain. A similar ring could’ve been bought at any number of stores for around five hundred dollars, even less at a pawn shop. But she would’ve been happy to receive a plastic ring from a gum-ball machine, if only it held any of the usual symbolism.

“Well?” he asked.

She took it out and slid it easily onto her finger. The fit was loose but with a little tape she could fix that. “This is the best you can do?” she said with a grimace as if she hated the ring as much as the thought of wearing it.

He gave her a grin that wasn’t meant to be sexy but managed to look that way. “What can you expect from a lowly cement contractor?”

She supposed his cover would have to involve a job that required manual labor. How else would he explain all those muscles? “Can you actually pour cement?”

“I can do anything,” he said.

She knew he was teasing but, from what she’d seen, that was true.

2

According to the dossier Milt had created, they’d start this job by moving into a mobile home in Portal, Arizona, a small town five miles east of Paradise. Not only would Rachel keep her first name, she’d keep her age—twenty-eight. But that was about it. Under her assumed identity—Rachel Mott—she came from Utah instead of California. She had four siblings living in and around Salt Lake City. She’d married Nate three years ago, after meeting him at a Jazz game.

There was a little more—her schooling, her previous job at a child-care facility, information about their families and backgrounds. But as Rachel studied the dossier, she felt her anxiety increase. Going undercover with Nate would be even more difficult than she’d thought. How would they pull it off? There were details husbands and wives knew about each other, intimacies shared, that couldn’t be faked. And what about body language? Ever since the night she’d surprised him in his bed, Nate had been careful not to come within three feet of her.

“Crap.” Finding the remote on her nightstand, she muted the television and sat in silence for several seconds. Should she call him? See if she could convince him to postpone the trip for a day or two? With more time, maybe they could talk Milt into letting her infiltrate Ethan’s cult on her own.

If she didn’t make her argument now, Nate would be at her door, packed and ready to go, in six hours.

“I’ve got to try.” Safety was a concern Nate would listen to. He always looked out for his team. It wasn’t just his SEAL training; it was part of his makeup. He’d fight Milt on those grounds if no other.

Feeling a fresh burst of confidence, she reached for the phone and dialed his number.

He answered on the first ring.

“He won’t let us off the hook,” he said. “And I’m sleeping. Don’t bother me again.”

He didn’t sound as if she’d awakened him. His voice wasn’t the least bit gravelly. But the click and subsequent dial tone told her he’d said all he was going to say on the subject.

Angry that he’d known the reason for her call before she could even say a word, she slammed the phone down and went back to the dossier. “This won’t work,” she mumbled. For instance, she might say that her brother was gay and he might call the same brother a womanizer. What then? There was no way they could script every detail ahead of time. Going undercover was all about ad-libbing. Trying to do this together could make it unravel. And Ethan was a dangerous man. Those letters to Manson confirmed it.

Rachel glanced at the stack she’d set to one side. The hero worship exhibited in Ethan’s earlier writing gave her chills. Had he really admired a man who’d used others, mostly women—except for Tex Watson—to brutally murder seven people? A lot of psychopaths admired killers because they themselves fantasized about committing the same kinds of acts. Was Ethan capable of such heinous crimes?

Putting the dossier on her nightstand, along with her fake ID, which had been tucked inside it, she picked up the letters and read them again. They were more than a decade old. She had no way of knowing if they still reflected Ethan’s thoughts and attitudes, but they gave her a glimpse into the psyche of the man he’d once been. He talked about Spahn Ranch, where Manson had lived when he ordered the murders. He compared it to a place he’d find for his own “spiritual family,” a place where he could “operate beneath the awareness of the outside world.” Except for one letter, he ignored Manson’s fascination with the Beatles and their music, but he quoted several of Manson’s favorite verses from the Book of Revelation 9:2, 3.

And he opened the bottomless pit…. And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth: and unto them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power.

“I have this power,” Ethan wrote. “I can feel it taking root in me. I can make scorpions of locusts. What would you have me do?”

Wishing she had Manson’s reply, she flipped to another letter, this one dated August 4, 1998. Here, Ethan began by thanking Manson for his latest response and quoting Revelation 9:4.

And it was commanded [that the locusts] should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any green thing, neither any tree; but only those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads.

“I have the mark,” Ethan informed Manson. “My people will freely take it upon themselves. They will be God’s avengers against the wicked. They will avenge you.”

That was where the brand came in, Rachel mused. He went on to quote verse 17.

And thus I saw the horses in the vision, and them that sat on them, having breastplates of fire, and of jacinth, and brimstone: and the heads of the horses were as the heads of lions; and out of their mouths issued fire and smoke and brimstone.

“You will be free,” Ethan promised Manson. “I will make you free.” He’d closed that particular letter by quoting one last verse.

And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit.

“You have passed that key to me.”

“‘You have passed that key to me,’” Rachel repeated. What did he mean by that? Did he feel as if he was taking over where Manson had left off?

That was a terrifying thought….

She chewed anxiously on her lip as she read the only letter in the pile that had been written by Manson.

“You know, a long time ago being crazy meant something. Nowadays everybody’s crazy. And you’re crazier than them all.”

Some sort of drink had been spilled on the bottom half, making the rest impossible to read. That was disappointing, especially because Ethan’s next letter revealed growing frustration. It seemed to be in response to Manson’s rebuke, or maybe there’d been a letter or two in between; the dates were three months apart. The gist of what he’d written suggested that Manson wasn’t living up to his prophet status, wasn’t guiding young Ethan as he wanted to be guided. Ethan was getting angry.

“You and all those Beatles songs, man. What was with that? What did the Beatles have to do with God? You’re full of shit, you know? Yellow Submarine, my ass. Where were you when Helter Skelter started? Safe at the ranch.”

Did that mean Ethan would be a different kind of leader? One who actively participated instead of watching from afar?

“The only thing you had right were the women. The women are where it’s at.”

Twisting her new wedding ring around her finger, Rachel read that line for the third time. Ethan had a fascination with women, probably because he felt more capable of bending them to his will. His mother had defended him and protected him against his father’s criticism, hadn’t she? Maybe he thought he could manipulate all women as easily as he’d manipulated his mother.

That was why she should do this job by herself. She had a better chance of appearing pliable without a hulking male at her side. And once she gained Ethan’s trust, it’d all be over. She’d bust him like she had so many drug dealers, shut him down as quickly as possible, so none of the other women in his commune would suffer as Martha Wilson had suffered.

She could imagine victory, but the satisfying image dissipated as the clock on the wall continued to tick. Five hours and counting…

It was too late to fight Milt’s insistence that Nate go with her.

In this part of the desert, night was nearly as hot as day. And the air hung heavy. There wasn’t so much as a slight breeze or a rustle—just the scrape of Bartholomew’s shovel. His efforts, sounding abnormally loud because of the silence and the rockiness of the soil, made him wince with each scoop. A tent filled with his fellow Covenanters stood only a few yards away. If someone woke and heard him, came to investigate, he’d have an even bigger problem on his hands….

But he wasn’t accustomed to this type of labor, and at forty-seven he was no longer young. Digging strained his back and made his arms feel so weak he could hardly keep going.

Taking a break to conserve his strength and catch his breath, he leaned on the shovel and gazed toward the little cemetery on the hill, half a mile or so away. It’d been established when Paradise was built as a mining town back in the early 1900s and it still had some of the old headstones jutting out of the bare soil beneath a paloverde tree. Thanks to a bright moon, Bart could almost make out the largest one. Except for the fact that the ground would be even harder, he wished he could dig this grave out there.

But burying Courtney Sinclair beyond the fence that encircled the commune wasn’t safe. It would be much more difficult to keep track of who came and went. What if someone noticed the disturbed earth and told Courtney’s parents? They’d already come to Paradise several times, looking for their daughter. Ethan had covered well, but Bartholomew had a feeling the situation was far from over. The Sinclairs weren’t going to give up and go away. Maybe Courtney claimed to have been unloved, that her parents were the worst parents ever, but her mother, at least, seemed quite devoted.

That just went to show that the girl didn’t have a clue about people. She was—had been, Bartholomew corrected as he glanced with distaste at the limp figure wrapped in a blanket at his feet—barely seventeen.