Dark Rivers of the Heart

photographs for the first time, Roy was overcome by a haunting sense that the woman’s face was familiar. Every word that Duvall spoke brought Roy closer to the enlightenment that had eluded him three mornings ago.

Duvall’s voice now came through the headphones with a strange, seductive softness: “She was found naked. Tortured, molested. Back then, it was the most savage murder anyone had ever seen. Even these days, when we’ve seen it all, the details would give you nightmares.”

The third snapshot showed Jennifer and the boy at poolside. She held one hand behind her son’s head, making horns with two fingers. The barn loomed in the background.

“Every indication was…she’d fallen victim to some transient,” said Duvall, pouring out the details in ever smaller drops as his flask of secrets slowly emptied. “A sociopath. Some guy with a car but no permanent address, roaming the interstate highways. It was a relatively new syndrome then, twenty-two years ago, but police had started to see it often enough to recognize it: the footloose serial killer, no ties to family or community, a shark out of his school.”

The woman. The boy. The barn in the background.

“The crime wasn’t solved for a while. For six years, in fact.”

The vibrations from the helicopter engine and rotors traveled through the frame of the craft, up Roy’s seat, into his bones, and carried with them a chill. A not unpleasant chill.

“The boy and his father continued to live on the ranch,” Duvall said. “There was a father.”

The woman. The boy. The barn in the background.

Roy turned up the fourth and final photograph.

The man in the shadows. That piercing stare.

“The boy’s name wasn’t Spencer. Michael,” Gary Duvall revealed.

The black-and-white studio photograph of the man in his middle thirties was moody: a fine study in contrasts, sunlight and darkness. Peculiar shadows, cast by unidentifiable objects beyond the frame, appeared to swarm across the wall, drawn by the subject, as if this were a man who commanded the night and all its powers.

“The boy’s name was Michael—”

“Ackblom.” Roy was at last able to recognize the subject in spite of the shadows that hid at least half the face. “Michael Ackblom. His father was Steven Ackblom, the painter. The murderer.”

“That’s right,” Duvall said, sounding disappointed that he had not been able to hold off that secret for another second or two.

“Refresh my memory. How many bodies did they eventually find?”

“Forty-one,” Duvall said. “And they’ve always thought there were more somewhere else.”

“‘They were all so beautiful in their pain, and all like angels when they died,’” Roy quoted.

“You remember that?” Duvall said in surprise.

“It’s the only thing Ackblom said in court.”

“It’s just about the only thing he said to the cops or his lawyer or anyone. He didn’t feel that he’d done anything so wrong, but he acknowledged as how he understood why society thought he had. So he pleaded guilty, confessed, and accepted sentencing.”

“‘They were all so beautiful in their pain, and all like angels when they died,’” Roy whispered.

* * *

As the Rover raced through the Utah morning, sunshine angled among the needled branches of the evergreens, flaring and flickering across the windshield. To Spencer, the swift play of bright light and shadow was as frenetic and disorienting as the pulsing of a stroboscopic lamp in a dark nightclub.

Even as he closed his eyes against that assault, he realized that he was bothered more by the association that each white flare triggered in his memory than he was by the sunshine itself. To his mind’s eye, every lambent glint and glimmer was the flash of hard, cold steel out of catacomb gloom.

He never ceased to be amazed and distressed by how completely the past remained alive in the present and by how the struggle to forget was an inducement to memory.

Tracing his scar with the fingertips of his right hand, he said, “Give me an example. Tell me about one of the scandals this nameless agency smoothed over.”

She hesitated. “David Koresh. The Branch Davidian compound. Waco, Texas.”

Her words startled him into opening his eyes even in the bright steel blades of sunshine and the dark-blood shadows. He stared at her in disbelief. “Koresh was a maniac!”

“No argument from me. He was four different kinds of maniac, as far as I know, and I sure wouldn’t disagree that the world is better off with him out of it.”

“Me neither.”

“But if the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms wanted him on weapons charges, they could’ve collared him at a bar in Waco, where he often went to hear a band he liked — and then they could’ve entered the compound, with him out of the way. Instead of storming his place with a SWAT team. There were children in there, for God’s sake.”

“Endangered children,” he reminded her.

“They sure were. They were burned to death.”

“Low blow,” he said accusingly, playing devil’s advocate.

“The government never produced any illegal weapons. At the trial they claimed to’ve found guns converted to full automatic fire, but there are lots of discrepancies. The Texas Rangers recovered only two guns for each sect member — all legal. Texas is a big gun state. Seventeen million people, over sixty million guns — four per resident. People in the sect had half the guns in the average Texas household.”

“Okay, this was in the newspapers. And the child-abuse stories turned out to have no apparent substance. That’s been reported — even if not widely. It’s a tragedy, for those dead kids and for the ATF. But what exactly did this nameless agency cover up? It was an ugly, very public mess for the government. Seems like they did a bad job making the ATF look good in this.”

“Oh, but they were brilliant at concealing the most explosive aspect of the case. An element in ATF loyal to Tom Summerton instead of to the current director intended to use Koresh as a test case for applying asset- forfeiture laws to religious organizations.”

As Utah rolled under their wheels and they drew nearer to Modena, Spencer continued to finger his scar while he thought about what she had revealed.

The trees had thinned out. The pines and spruces were too far from the highway to cast shadows across the pavement, and the sword dance of sunlight had ended. Yet Spencer noted that Valerie squinted at the road ahead and flinched slightly from time to time, as though she was threatened by her own blades of memory.

Behind them, Rocky seemed oblivious of the sobering weight of their conversation. Whatever its drawbacks, there were also many advantages to the canine condition.

At last Spencer said, “Targeting religious groups for asset seizure, even fringe figures like Koresh — that’s a major bombshell if it’s true. It shows utter contempt for the Constitution.”

“There are lots of cults and splinter sects these days, with millions in assets. That Korean minister — Reverend Moon? I’ll bet his church has hundreds of millions on U.S. soil. If any religious organization is involved in criminal activity, its tax-free status is revoked. Then if the ATF or FBI has a lien for asset forfeiture, it’ll be first in line, even ahead of the IRS, to grab everything.”

“A steady cash flow to buy more toys and better office furniture for the bureaus involved,” he said ruminatively. “And help to keep this nameless agency afloat. Even make it grow. While lots of local police forces — the guys who have to deal with real hard-core crime, street gangs, murder, rape — they’re all so starved for funds they can’t have pay raises or buy new equipment.”

As Modena passed by in four blinks of an eye, Valerie said, “And the accountability provisions of federal and state forfeiture laws are dismal. Seized assets are inadequately tracked — so a percentage just vanishes into the pockets of some of the officials involved.”

“Legalized theft.”

“No one’s ever caught, so it might as well be legal. Anyway, Summerton’s element in ATF planned to plant drugs, phony records of major drug sales, and lots of illegal weapons in the Mount Carmel Center — Koresh’s compound — after the success of the initial assault.”