was mounted on the roof, pointed at a forty-five-degree angle at the sky. Floodlights were mounted at the tops of the building’s southeast and northeast corner posts where they met the front ends of the second-floor balcony. The lights on the northeast post were dark. Lights were on inside the first and second floors, shining through the windows.
The northeast corner post floodlight hung at a twisted angle. Broken glass littered the ground below it. Jack stood under it, looking up. Neal said, “It was shot out. The lab crew recovered one of the bullets. It’s from a handgun but they haven’t typed it yet.”
Jack nodded.
Four wide wooden stairs led to a porch, a veranda that fronted the building on three sides, all but the west side. The second-floor balcony was similarly constructed. It was as if the builders had shunned the rear of the building, its west face. Behind the back of the building, behind the entire cluster, rose a jumble of sandstone formations, pillars and needles and boulders, all eroded into angular, distorted shapes.
Jack and Neal climbed the stairs to the porch. The front door hung at a tilted angle, half torn off its hinges. The second-floor balcony roofed over the veranda.
A row of tall windows were set in the walls on either side of the doorway. A window to the right of the doorway was broken, leaving a mostly empty frame. Shards of broken glass were strewn on the porch below it. Dark reddish- brown stains, long-dried, mottled the outside of the windowsill and the wall beneath it. The porch planks under the window were stained, too. The stains were pretty big, the largest being bathmat-sized. White chalk markings had been drawn around the stains by the crime lab team. Each marking was tagged with an identifying letter-number combination written in chalk.
Jack said, “Looks like it was broken from the inside out. Like somebody jumped or was thrown through the window. Whoever it was must’ve been cut up pretty badly. Bad enough to have bled to death, if all that blood came from one person.” He looked at Neal. “No bodies were found?”
Neal said, “None.”
Jack took a closer look, while avoiding stepping on the chalked-off bloodstains. The stains went to the front edge of the porch. What looked like bloody handprints showed on the top rail of the waist-high balustrade bordering the edge of the porch.
He switched on his flashlight, shining it down on the ground below the porch. Bloodstains extended out in dribs and drabs for a dozen yards or so before coming to an abrupt halt. He said, “The injured party managed to get that far before dropping. Then what happened?”
Neal said, “Your guess.”
Jack edged north along the porch, carefully picking his way through, trying to avoid treading on the broken glass and bloodstains. Neal followed, saying, “The lab crew’s already photographed and diagrammed everything, so you don’t have to worry about messing up anything or altering the scene.” Jack noticed that Neal, too, despite his words made an effort, conscious or not, to avoid stepping on glass or bloodstains.
Jack turned left at the corner, following the north branch of the veranda to its end at the building’s no rthwest corner. He shone the fl ashlight around, noticing a cluster of propane gas tanks connected by pipes to the building’s rear.
An open space about twenty yards wide stretched from the backs of all the buildings in an arc to the foot of the jumbled sandstone formations. It was bordered by an eight-foot-tall chain-link fence topped with three strands of barbed wire. The fence extended in both directions, north and south, enclosing the western edge of the oval before curving eastward on both sides to complete the encirclement of the rest of the space.
Jack said, “The compound is completely fenced in?”
Neal, at his shoulder, said, “Yes.”
Jack gestured with the flashlight so its beam played across the jagged rock rim beyond the fence. “Any roads back there?”
“A couple of game trails, maybe. Nothing you could get a vehicle through, not even a dirt bike.”
“So the front gate’s the only way in or out?”
“I suppose there’s places along the fence line that could be hopped, if you were determined and athletic enough. But whoever did it would be walking, not riding. And they’d be in for a hell of a hike. Why?”
“No particular reason, just trying to get the lay of the land.”
Jack turned, starting back the way he came, Neal falling into step behind him. Neal said, “The Zealots didn’t troop out of here on foot, if that’s what you’re thinking. We know how they left.”
Jack said, “How?”
“They’ve got an old school bus that they use to get around in. They’re always driving in a group to the county seat or down into Denver or wherever to hold protest demonstrations or stage media events. Prewitt’s big on that. A natural- born pest. The bus is painted blue, kind of a trademark so people’ll know they’re coming. They keep it in a garage up here and it’s not there now, so we figure that’s how they left the scene.”
“A blue bus, eh? Sounds like it’d be hard to hide.”
Neal said grimly, “You’d think so.”
They went to the front of the building and went inside into a long, narrow hall. It ran straight through the building from front to back. There were four rooms on the first floor, two on either side of the hall. A staircase led up to the second floor.
The front room on the right was a kind of communications center. That was the room where the window was broken from the inside out. Not much seemed disturbed, apart from that. A floor lamp was knocked over and lay on its side. A mass of moths flew in circles under an overhead light. A couple of workstations were placed around the space, complete with computers, phone banks, printers, fax machines, and the like. A Styrofoam cup of coffee stood on one of the desks. It gave the impression that the desk’s occupant had just stepped away for a minute, except that the cream in the coffee had curdled and the cup’s contents were a gray- brown sludge.
Each workstation featured a hardcover book in a prominent position. They were all the same book. Jack picked one up and examined it. The title was: Whip Them with Scorpions. It was subtitled, driving the Money- Changers from the Temple.
It was a very thick book, a real doorstopper, with lots of fine print and charts and graphs but no pictures. Its author was Abelson Prewitt. The back cover displayed a black-and-white photo of Prewitt. A big, double-domed cranium topped a long, bony face. A few thin strands of black hair were plastered across his oversized skull. Dark, intent eyes glared behind thick-lensed black glasses. Thin lips were tightly compressed.
Neal said dryly, “His magnum opus. Ever read it?”
Jack said, “I’m waiting for the movie. You?”
“Part of it. I got farther through it than anybody else in my outfit. That’s what makes me the expert.”
“What’s it like?”
“Let me put it this way: if you think people have some cracked ideas about sex — which they do— that’s nothing compared to some of the crazy notions out there about economics.”
“That bad, huh?”
“Prewitt’s like most philosophers cracked or sane, if there are any of the latter. He comes up with a theory that he claims explains why everything works the way it does better than the theories of all the other thinkers who’ve done the same thing. They’re all just chasing their tails around, as far as I’m concerned.”
Jack said, “That makes you a philosopher, too.” The book was heavy. Jack set it down. He said, “I take it there’s no love lost between Prewitt and the Round Table?”
Neal said, “You can take that to the bank. No, better not. Prewitt’s not too happy with the banking system, either.”
The left front room was a kind of day room. There was a fireplace, a sofa, and a couple of armchairs. The mantle over the fireplace was lined with books, every one of them a copy of Whip Them with Scorpions. A card table with three opened folding chairs grouped around it stood in a corner. The fourth chair stuck half in and half out of the frame of a big-screen TV it had been pitched through.
The left back room was a storeroom for the cult’s publications. One wall had a floor- to-ceiling bookshelf devoted solely to copies of Prewitt’s masterwork. Tables were stacked with copies of Zealot newsletters and pamphlets. The subjects reflected such topics as the iniquity of the Federal Reserve banking system, the necessity of returning to the gold standard, the Wall Street/Washington, D.C. plot to repeal the Constitution and turn the United States into a slave state, and various world- historical conspiracies by the Illuminati and Freemasonry to rule
